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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. Re:Linux distro's already do this. by phoenix_rizzen · · Score: 5, Interesting

    "Because Linux does it" is not always a good reason to do something. Linux developers tend to throw anything and everything they can into the mix. BSD developers tend to watch what others do, research the pros/cons, then develop a plan on how to do it right ... before tackling the coding.

    Hence, while Linux distros tend to get things first, BSD tends to get things right. :)

  2. My understanding... by devphil · · Score: 3, Interesting


    ...was that, in earlier *nixes, sbin programs were always statically linked, to avoid problems with requiring /usr, or accidentally damaging the dynamic loader, or still functioning while restoring dynamic libs from tape, etc, etc.

    Not necessarily FreeBSD, but just some flavor of Unix. The versions of Digital Unix (under different names) which I teethed on were designed like this.

    It's always annoyed me that Linux's [/usr]/sbin was dynamically linked.

    --
    You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem. (Edwards' Law)
  3. Re:Linux distro's already do this. by Arandir · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Hence, while Linux distros tend to get things first, BSD tends to get things right.

    Actually, BSD gets a lot things first. First to have a commercial support, first to have a free and complete operating system, and first to get sued by obnoxious companies :-). More recently, first to implement IP6, Serial ATA, Hyperthreading, etc. I would have to check, but I think they got USB and Firewire first as well.

    --
    A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned