Making a dynamically-linked root

[Gordon Tetlow]

I'm planning on making a dynamically-linked root partition by 5.2. To
that end, I'm planning on doing to the following:

Integrate Tim Kientzle's /rescue patches into the tree
Create /lib and populate with all the libs needed to support dynamically
  linked binaries in /bin and /sbin
Have a big (probably NO_DYNAMIC_ROOT) knob to switch from static to
  dynamic.

There will be a performance hit associated with this. I did a quick
measurement at boot and my boot time (from invocation of /etc/rc to
the login prompt) went from 12 seconds with a static root to 15
seconds with a dynamic root. I have yet to perform a worldstone on
it.

The reason to do this is two-fold. One is to give better support
for PAM and NSS in the base system. The second is to save some disk
space. Currently (on my x86 box), /bin and /sbin are 32 MB. With
a dynamically linked root (and some pruning of some binaries), the
/bin, /lib, and /sbin come out to 6.1 MB. This should be great for
people with 2.x and 3.x era root partitions that are only about 50
MB.

My preliminary patches are at
http://people.freebsd.org/~gordon/patches/dynamic.patch.small

They are a bit rough, but I'm working on finishing up the work and
integrating it after 5.1 is released.

-gordon
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