Unfortunate dynamic linking for everything

Tim Kientzle kientzle at acm.org
Fri Nov 21 15:59:50 PST 2003


Bruce Evans wrote:
> It obviously uses NSS.  How else could it be so bloated? :
> 
> $ ls -l /sbin/init
> -r-x------  1 root  wheel  453348 Nov 18 10:30 /sbin/init

I believe it's actually DNS, not NSS.

Pre-5.0, the resolver ballooned significantly.
A lot of the bloat in /bin and /sbin came
from the NIS functions which in turn pull in
the resolver.

Example: /bin/date on 5.1 is also over 450k
because of a single call to getservbyname().
Removing that one call shrinks a static /bin/date
to a quite reasonable size. (I seem to recall 80k when
I did this experiment.)

I note that /sbin/init calls getpwnam();
I expect that's where the bloat gets pulled in.

Tim Kientzle



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