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Dynamic Root Support For FreeBSD Now Available

Posted by Hemos on from the coming-at-you dept.

Dan writes "FreeBSD's Gordon Tetlow has committed his enhancements to enable users to build /bin and /sbin dynamically linked on FreeBSD. His reason to do this is two-fold. One is to give better support for PAM and NSS in the base system. The second is to save some disk space. Currently (on his x86 box), /bin and /sbin are 32 MB. With a dynamically linked root (and some pruning of some binaries), the /bin, /lib, and /sbin come out to 6.1 MB. This should be great for people with 2.x and 3.x era root partitions that are only about 50 MB. Gordon says that there will be a performance hit associated with this. He did a quick measurement at boot and his boot time (from invocation of /etc/rc to the login prompt) went from 12 seconds with a static root to 15 seconds with a dynamic root."

3 of 112 comments (clear)

  1. bad bad bad by Tirel · · Score: 5, Insightful

    not only will this affect performance, but it will also make it impossible to recover a server if you accidentally delete /usr,

    there are less and less reasons to use seperate partitions for root directories, and this is *NOT GOOD*

    1. Re:bad bad bad by Fweeky · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Er, why? /bin, /sbin and /lib should all be on the same partition, and if you're really screwed, that's what /rescue is for.

    2. Re:bad bad bad by ctr2sprt · · Score: 4, Insightful

      It's not good as a default, but it's good as an option. So while I hope FreeBSD installs still come with a static bin+sbin, it's nice to have the option, on a make world, to change the behavior if I decide I need to. It's added flexibility without any added complexity. What more could you want?