Dynamic Root Support For FreeBSD Now Available

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."

Comments

bad bad bad

[Tirel]

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*

Re:bad bad bad

[Nizzt]

Thats why the librarys are in /lib not /usr/lib

Re:bad bad bad

[cperciva]

it will also make it impossible to recover a server if you accidentally delete /usr

No. The libraries used by stuff in /bin and /sbin are being moved into /lib, so everything which is being changed from static to dynamic will still work even if /usr is gone.

Also note that /rescue is still static (and crunched).

Re:Linux distro's already do this.

[phoenix_rizzen]

"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. :)