Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by blibble 1236 days ago
I thought openbsd did it after boot?
2 comments

OpenBSD relinks sshd. Which is relatively small thing that is linked from relatively large objects (ie. it is the typical modern C code). Relinking thing like glibc on demand is going to be problematic, because it is structured as to allow small binary sizes for static linking and thus almost every function that is part of glibc API is a separate compilation unit and object file. Linking that into .so is slow, no mater what kind of optimalization tricks you implement in the linker.
doesn't matter how long it takes if you don't block the boot process doing it

you can link in the background at idle priority, and if you don't complete before reboot: no big deal

Relinking glibc would block the boot process.
how?

it's a dynamic library, and this isn't windoze with awful mandatory locking

as long as the underlying version is unchanged: there should be no problem whatsoever

glibc is going to get used by everything in userspace, so you’ll need it when you boot.
Yes, but this thread is about doing the linking after boot. It doesn't matter if you link synchronously before you start the program or link asynchronously after you start the program - you will still get a new unique binary for each boot.
yes... it is there at boot

then after boot you relink for next boot

Yeah. That said, I'm suggesting that if it was really too slow, though, it'd probably be infeasible to relink libc, the kernel, etc. at bootup. It's not a direct comparison to be sure.