[Talk] State of dynamic linking in various platforms...

[Peter Jeremy]

On 2002-Aug-22 14:24:53 +1000, Luke Mewburn <lukem at wasabisystems.com> wrote:
> NetBSD
>  Statically linked /bin and /sbin. Rest dynamically linked
>  against /usr/lib (with the linker in /usr/libexec/ld.elf_so).
>
> FreeBSD
   Statically linked /bin and /sbin.  Virtually everything else is
   dynamically linked against /usr/lib.  The runtime linker is
   /usr/libexec/ld-elf.so.1.  There are a couple of exceptions like
   cc(1), make(1), ld(1) to simplify recovery from a damaged libc.so
   or rtld.

> OpenBSD
>  Similar to NetBSD ???

I'd be very surprised if this was different to NetBSD.

>I'm working on a solution to making NetBSD have a dynamically linked
>"world", to solve a variety of problems (such as dlopen(3) not working
>for programs in /bin and /sbin because they're statically linked),

I think a more correct solution is add hooks so that it is possible
to call dlopen(3) from a static binary, rather than move to dynamic
linking.  I think this topic has been thrashed out recently on one
of the FreeBSD lists and people aren't keen to move to a fully
dynamically linked FreeBSD.

Note that dynamic linking is not a cure-all for everything.  There are
security and performance reasons for retaining the ability to link
applications statically.

Peter