HEADS UP: /bin and /sbin are now dynamically linked
Bill Vermillion
bv at wjv.com
Thu Nov 20 16:41:48 PST 2003
On Thu, Nov 20, 2003 at 16:31 , while impersonating an expert on
the internet, Tim Kientzle sent this to stdout:
> 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 at .
> 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.
Happened to me in the past too.
> 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.
Considering that rescue mode will most often be run from a console
login or a serial console, I would thing the default console name
termcap [cons25] and something ubuiquitous such as vt102 would
do quite well - as you could cover almost all with just those
two.
That surely beats older systems where all I had in recovery
attempts was echo to see what was there, and ed for editing.
I like your idea.
Bill
--
Bill Vermillion - bv @ wjv . com
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