Making a dynamically-linked root

[Sam Leffler]

> I think for _most_ situations, including the boot scripts, the extra added
time
> is negligible.  In the boot scripts some of that added time can be
recuperated
> in other ways (look at the patch I post earlier in the thread). But most
> importantly, I think people are forgetting that this is going to be
*optional*.
> If you don't want to use it, don't.
>
> In many ways this boils down to the age-old bikeshed of "do we want to
keep
> moving into the future or stay tied to the past because we don't want to
lose a
> single bit of performance on that old 386 with 8MB ram we have lying
around."
> For those of us who can't get our companies/clients to use FreeBSD because
it
> can't be integrated into their network this feature is fantastic. For
those of
> us who would rather stay with something that works for us and we're happy
with,
> we can chose not to enable it.

Gordon posted boot-time numbers because I prodded him about not committing
the changes until he had a handle on the performance implications.  The time
for a system to reach the "login prompt" was one criteria for some companies
I watched go through the same exercise (I also suggested some other tests
for which I haven't seen results).  Mind you they were not talking about a
diskless boot to "login:" but rather booting into a GUI environment where a
lot of applications run during startup.

The point, regardless, was that blindly making these changes while we are
still trying to resolve basic system performance issues is not a great idea.
netbsd recently switched to a dynamically-linked root and before committing
to the change they devoted a bunch of effort into improving the performance
of their dll runtime.

    Sam