From owner-freebsd-current@FreeBSD.ORG Thu Nov 20 16:31:21 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 BFD0716A4CE for ; Thu, 20 Nov 2003 16:31:21 -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 A2F3743FF3 for ; Thu, 20 Nov 2003 16:31:20 -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 hAL0VBkX031285; Thu, 20 Nov 2003 16:31:11 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from kientzle@acm.org) Message-ID: <3FBD5CCE.40905@acm.org> Date: Thu, 20 Nov 2003 16:31:10 -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: Garance A Drosihn References: <200311171726.hAHHQ0Mj028252@tower.berklix.org> In-Reply-To: Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit cc: bv@wjv.com cc: Julian Stacey cc: freebsd-current@freebsd.org Subject: Re: HEADS UP: /bin and /sbin are now dynamically linked 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: Fri, 21 Nov 2003 00:31:21 -0000 Garance A Drosihn wrote: > At 6:26 PM +0100 11/17/03, Julian Stacey wrote: >> Seconded ! Better commit an improved switch with >> default = Off. > > The time for voting was months ago. Actually, the discussion started almost a year ago now. That's when the new PAM/NSS libraries were first being announced, which was a big driving factor for all-dynamic linking. I recall quite a bit of that discussion happening right here on current@. Many of us here have been hamstrung by systems that didn't provide a static fallback. I've personally been bitten by unrecoverable Linux and Solaris systems due to hosed shared libraries. That's why I volunteered to build /rescue in the first place, so that I'd never be faced with an unrecoverable FreeBSD machine. I'm pretty comfortable with the failsafes that we have in place: * /sbin/init is static * If /bin/sh fails, /rescue/sh can be run * /rescue provides a complete set of statically-linked sysadmin utilities that should be sufficient for recovering a damaged system. There are a few things I'd like to see: * It would be nice if the kernel noticed that /sbin/init failed too quickly and prompted the user for an alternate init. That would open the door to a dynamic or just more ambitious /sbin/init, since you could always fall back to /rescue/init for recovery. * /rescue/vi is currently unusable if /usr is missing because the termcap database is in /usr. One possibility would be to build a couple of default termcap entries into ncurses or into vi. If there are still rough edges on some of this well, that is what -CURRENT is all about, after all. ;-) Tim Kientzle