From owner-freebsd-arch@FreeBSD.ORG Tue Jun 3 09:35:35 2003 Return-Path: Delivered-To: freebsd-arch@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.FreeBSD.org (mx1.freebsd.org [216.136.204.125]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 7E63537B401 for ; Tue, 3 Jun 2003 09:35:35 -0700 (PDT) Received: from ebb.errno.com (ebb.errno.com [66.127.85.87]) by mx1.FreeBSD.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id D8BF443F85 for ; Tue, 3 Jun 2003 09:35:34 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from sam@errno.com) Received: from melange (melange.errno.com [66.127.85.82]) (authenticated bits=0) by ebb.errno.com (8.12.9/8.12.9) with ESMTP id h53GZTpw077657 (version=TLSv1/SSLv3 cipher=RC4-MD5 bits=128 verify=NO); Tue, 3 Jun 2003 09:35:29 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from sam@errno.com) Message-ID: <093601c329ee$24fe0b90$52557f42@errno.com> From: "Sam Leffler" To: "Mike Makonnen" , "Andrew Gallatin" References: <20030603113927.I71313@cvs.imp.ch><16092.35144.948752.554975@grasshopper.cs.duke.edu><20030603115432.EGLB13328.out002.verizon.net@kokeb.ambesa.net><16092.36129.388194.477452@grasshopper.cs.duke.edu> <20030603122226.BGPM11703.pop018.verizon.net@kokeb.ambesa.net> Date: Tue, 3 Jun 2003 09:34:59 -0700 Organization: Errno Consulting MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Priority: 3 X-MSMail-Priority: Normal X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook Express 5.50.4920.2300 X-MimeOLE: Produced By Microsoft MimeOLE V5.50.4920.2300 cc: arch@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Making a dynamically-linked root X-BeenThere: freebsd-arch@freebsd.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.1 Precedence: list List-Id: Discussion related to FreeBSD architecture List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Tue, 03 Jun 2003 16:35:35 -0000 > I think for _most_ situations, including the boot scripts, the extra added time > is negligible. In the boot scripts some of that added time can be recuperated > in other ways (look at the patch I post earlier in the thread). But most > importantly, I think people are forgetting that this is going to be *optional*. > If you don't want to use it, don't. > > In many ways this boils down to the age-old bikeshed of "do we want to keep > moving into the future or stay tied to the past because we don't want to lose a > single bit of performance on that old 386 with 8MB ram we have lying around." > For those of us who can't get our companies/clients to use FreeBSD because it > can't be integrated into their network this feature is fantastic. For those of > us who would rather stay with something that works for us and we're happy with, > we can chose not to enable it. Gordon posted boot-time numbers because I prodded him about not committing the changes until he had a handle on the performance implications. The time for a system to reach the "login prompt" was one criteria for some companies I watched go through the same exercise (I also suggested some other tests for which I haven't seen results). Mind you they were not talking about a diskless boot to "login:" but rather booting into a GUI environment where a lot of applications run during startup. The point, regardless, was that blindly making these changes while we are still trying to resolve basic system performance issues is not a great idea. netbsd recently switched to a dynamically-linked root and before committing to the change they devoted a bunch of effort into improving the performance of their dll runtime. Sam