From owner-freebsd-current@FreeBSD.ORG Tue Dec 2 16:48:37 2003 Return-Path: Delivered-To: freebsd-current@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.FreeBSD.org (mx1.freebsd.org [216.136.204.125]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id BEDB016A4CE for ; Tue, 2 Dec 2003 16:48:37 -0800 (PST) Received: from kientzle.com (h-66-166-149-50.SNVACAID.covad.net [66.166.149.50]) by mx1.FreeBSD.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 0C67443FE5 for ; Tue, 2 Dec 2003 16:48:36 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from kientzle@acm.org) Received: from acm.org ([66.166.149.54]) by kientzle.com (8.12.9/8.12.9) with ESMTP id hB30mRkX086187; Tue, 2 Dec 2003 16:48:28 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from kientzle@acm.org) Message-ID: <3FCD32DB.4030204@acm.org> Date: Tue, 02 Dec 2003 16:48:27 -0800 From: Tim Kientzle User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; FreeBSD i386; en-US; rv:1.4) Gecko/20031006 X-Accept-Language: en-us, en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: Bob Willcox References: <200311250106.hAP16qNp018512@realtime.exit.com> <200311251212.59933.doconnor@gsoft.com.au> <3FCCF094.5040006@tcoip.com.br> <3FCD0774.60807@acm.org> <20031202221940.GF38911@luke.immure.com> In-Reply-To: <20031202221940.GF38911@luke.immure.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit cc: freebsd-current@freebsd.org cc: Andrew Gallatin Subject: Re: 40% slowdown with dynamic /bin/sh X-BeenThere: freebsd-current@freebsd.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.1 Precedence: list Reply-To: kientzle@acm.org List-Id: Discussions about the use of FreeBSD-current List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Wed, 03 Dec 2003 00:48:37 -0000 Bob Willcox wrote: > > What impact, if any, will this have on those of us that use NIS and > still want a statically linked root? I have been using NIS for years ... First, let me clarify that I'm advocating moving NIS out of libc in the 6.0 timeframe. Also, I'm not suggesting anyone replace NIS with LDAP. FreeBSD currently has a strong bias for NIS over LDAP; I just think we should support both equally. How would this affect a static root? Make it a lot smaller and faster, for starters. NIS adds as much as 400k each to many programs in /bin and /sbin. Over a quarter of a static /bin/sh is from NIS support. Does that rule out NIS with a static root? Yes, with the current NSS/PAM implementation, although a variety of suggestions have been floated around that would make NSS/PAM compatible with static binaries. My personal favorite is to implement NSS/PAM daemons to satisfy such requests. Such daemons are surprisingly simple to implement, in my experience. I'm skeptical of efforts to use dlopen() with static binaries; static binaries don't have symbol tables, so there's no way to resolve references from the dlopen()-ed library back into the executable. I'm curious, though. The single most convincing argument so far in favor of a static root has been performance. Doesn't the NIS network overhead swamp any performance gains from static linking? I suspect you have other reasons for wanting a static root. (Or do you only require certain executables to be static, such as /bin/sh?) Tim Kientzle