/bin And /sbin Now Dynamically Linked In FreeBSD

Posted by timothy on Monday November 17, 2003 @02:07AM from the seen-at-same-nightclub dept.

Dan writes "Gordon Tetlow just committed a patch in FreeBSD current to change /bin and /sbin from statically to dynamically linked. The reason to do this is two-fold. This feature brings support for loadable PAM and NSS modules to base system utilities located in those directories. It also reduces the storage requirements for the root filesystem due to the use of shared libraries. This feature can be disabled in a buildworld by defining the Makefile (make.conf) variable WITHOUT_DYNAMICROOT. Note that statically-linked, crunched executables are available in the /rescue directory for use during system repair and recovery operations."

1 of 172 comments (clear)

Min score:

Reason:

Sort:

Purpose of / by martycombs · 2003-11-17 05:17 · Score: 3, Interesting

I thought *nix was designed as:

/ - minimum required to boot and repair system
/usr - other binaries included on default distro
/usr/local or /opt - packages added above and beyond the distro
If your system ever became damaged, you booted to / and fixed it. If / is too large, then audit what's in there and make sure it contains the bare minimum required.

Adding /rescue is unnecessarily cluttering up the system.