Enormous utmp since mpsafetty

[Ollivier Robert]

According to Gary Jennejohn:
> There are many more pseudo-ttys in /etc/ttys now.  AFAIK utmp allocates
> an entry for every one of them at startup.

utmp concepts are ancient.  It is indexed by the tty/pty number so can grow
rather large but it should be a sparse one too.  I remember talks about
replacing it with something a bit more modern.  Backward compatibility is
assured through login(3) although it would break programs digging in the
utmp file itself.  SVR4 had utmp/utmpx and setutline/getutline BTW...

cf. sessreg(1)

       System  V has a better interface to utmp than BSD; it dynamically allo-
       cates entries in the file, instead of writing them at  fixed positions
       indexed by position in /etc/ttys.

-- 
Ollivier ROBERT -=- FreeBSD: The Power to Serve! -=- roberto at keltia.freenix.fr
Darwin sidhe.keltia.net Version 9.2.0: Tue Feb  5 16:13:22 PST 2008; i386