Date: Thu, 20 Nov 2003 16:31:10 -0800 From: Tim Kientzle <kientzle@acm.org> To: Garance A Drosihn <drosih@rpi.edu> Cc: freebsd-current@freebsd.org Subject: Re: HEADS UP: /bin and /sbin are now dynamically linked Message-ID: <3FBD5CCE.40905@acm.org> In-Reply-To: <p0600201fbbdeea6a2dc1@[128.113.24.47]> References: <200311171726.hAHHQ0Mj028252@tower.berklix.org> <p0600201fbbdeea6a2dc1@[128.113.24.47]>
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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
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