40% slowdown with dynamic /bin/sh

[Garance A Drosihn]

At 9:19 AM -0600 11/25/03, Jacques A. Vidrine wrote:
>On Mon, Nov 24, 2003, Andrew Gallatin wrote:
>
>So can we just have a statically linked /bin/sh and get on
>with life?

I still think we would be better off using 5.2-release for
collecting more experience with the *operational* issues of
having a dynamic /bin/sh.  We all know and knew that there
would be a performance hit.  We also all know that a static
/bin/sh will work fine in disaster situations.

>That seems to have the most impact.  We can also expend
>our efforts to improve dynamic linking performance, since
>that will improve the performance of the other 99.9% of
>the universe.

This is certainly my hope.  There are more ways to solve the
performance problem than just statically-linking /bin/sh.

If we do not alleviate the performance issues via other means,
then we can certainly statically-link /bin/sh for 5.3-release.
We have run with a statically-linked /bin/sh for years, so
there is nothing much to *learn* by running with it for the
next two months.  Yes, there is a performance benefit, but
nothing to *learn*.

But my fear is that if we *do* address the performance issues,
then we'll still shy off a dynamically-linked /bin/sh simply
because some folks will say "we don't know that we can trust
it", etc.

I have no objection if we want to statically-link some things
like /bin/sh for 5.3-release, but I don't think we need to do
it for 5.2-release -- aka "a snapshot of freebsd-current".

-- 
Garance Alistair Drosehn            =   gad at gilead.netel.rpi.edu
Senior Systems Programmer           or  gad at freebsd.org
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute    or  drosih at rpi.edu