Making a dynamically-linked root

[Garance A Drosihn]

At 10:42 AM -0300 6/4/03, Daniel C. Sobral wrote:
>So, I did not have any single point of failure for single
>file corruption before. Now I do. But you claim there was
>not significant increase, statistically speaking. Could
>you please point out what am I missing?

If you do not want a dynamically-linked root, then do not
turn on the option which will give you one.

Me, if any of these files are corrupt, I generally reboot into
a different snapshot of freebsd, or boot up off a CD and fix
things from there.  While it's an entertaining exercise to see
if you can rescue a badly-damaged system while running from
that very same system, the same way it was exciting to watch
"Das Boot" and see if the crew will survive, I usually have
better things I would like to do with my time.

Furthermore, you're approaching this as if "corruption" is only
a hardware issue.  What if the "corruption" is that your system
has just been broken into?  Well, then, you pretty much can not
trust anything, even if a program does run.  So why not have a
plan (such as a bootable CD-rom) which works for all kinds of
corruption?  Personally, I'm a lot more concerned about a
break-in than hardware-failure, but maybe I'm just lucky with
hardware.

I realize that there are many legitimate uses which will have
problems with a dynamically-linked root, but I expect that for
most users that is not a requirement.  For the situations where
it is important, I do expect that freebsd should always support
the option to have a statically-linked root.

If a user needs a statically-linked root but does not know
they need it, then they probably won't know enough to fix a
severely-broken system anyway.

-- 
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