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

[Luke Mewburn]

On Thu, Aug 22, 2002 at 02:50:32PM +1000, Michael Paddon wrote:
  | > 	OpenBSD
  | > 		Similar to NetBSD ???
  | 
  | Yes, except for /sbin/tbrconfig (part of ALTQ). Who knows why?

Oversight?  Dictate from Theo?  Who knows :)


  | One of the really nice things about statically linked executables
  | is that you can whack them onto any system (which supports the
  | correct kernel traps), without worrying about having to get the
  | right libraries. This makes add on apps far less sensitive to the
  | "right" version and makes binary emulation (say a linux executable
  | on a FreeBSD box) more of a sure thing.

Yes, but given ~ all of modern Linux systems are dynamically linked, it's
a hard problem anyway.  I don't know how FreeBSD/OpenBSD solve that one,
but the Linux emulation stuff on NetBSD searchs in /emul/linux/{path}
for files before /{path}, so we just populate /emul/linux/usr/lib
with SuSE 7.3 libraries :)  I run a variety of Linux programs under
emulation on NetBSD:
	storage-manager-3.14	(Adaptec RAID mgmt utils)
	ns-flash-5.0.47
	navigator-4.79
	acroread-5.06
	stuffit-5.2.0.611


  | What about people who whine about recovery? Boot from floppy/CDROM
  | of course, fix the problem and get on with it. A worse case scenario
  | requires this approach anyway, and hosing a key .so could be
  | regarded as a catastrophic situation.

Unfortunately we can't just do the "screw them" approach.
/rescue solves the issue anyway...


  | One interesting approach might be to have a back up ld.so and core
  | libraries that the system could fall back to automatically in the
  | case of a hard failure.

Could be doable, although I personally prefer manual intervention in
that situation.


  | It would be really nice if third party apps provided statically
  | linked versions, however, so that they can be easily run under
  | emulation.

Mmm, foreign operating system emulation...
(NetBSD *is* the champion at that :)


Luke.