RFC: libkse*.a in 7.0

[Daniel Eischen]

On Wed, 28 Nov 2007, Robert Watson wrote:

>
> On Wed, 28 Nov 2007, Brooks Davis wrote:
>
>> A number of people have proposed a direction in 8.0 that would remove 
>> support for the syscalls and kernel data structures required by libkse. 
>> Apparently this would enable significant simplification of portions of the 
>> kernel, but I have no deeply held personal opinion.  The intent is that if 
>> that happens, alternate versions of the necessicary dynamic libraries will 
>> be supplied in updated compat#x packages.  This will address most 
>> consumers. The one set of consumers that would not be addressed is those 
>> who have statically linked, threaded binaries using libkse.
>
> It's worth noting that some other mainstream operating systems work hard to 
> disallow static linking for precisely this sort of reason -- when I last 
> checked, Mac OS X had only one statically linked binary, init, and it may 
> well be that launchd is dynamically linked.  This is part of a very explicit 
> policy that the defined ABI for applications is *not* the system call layer, 
> but rather, the library interfaces, which gives greater flexibility to modify 
> the system call interface as needed.

I argued for removing libc.a as well as lib<thread>.a a couple of
years ago and was met with opposition, mostly because statically
linked applications are faster.

I think we should remove libthr.a, libkse.a and libc.a, so flame on!

-- 
DE