Return to BSD News archive
Xref: sserve comp.os.386bsd.development:1452 comp.os.386bsd.misc:1577 Path: sserve!newshost.anu.edu.au!munnari.oz.au!news.Hawaii.Edu!ames!elroy.jpl.nasa.gov!usc!howland.reston.ans.net!mcsun!ieunet!news.ieunet.ie!jkh From: jkh@whisker.lotus.ie (Jordan K. Hubbard) Newsgroups: comp.os.386bsd.development,comp.os.386bsd.misc Subject: Something positive for a change: FreeBSD 1.0 shared libs are working Date: 15 Nov 1993 08:37:42 GMT Organization: Dublin, Ireland Lines: 66 Distribution: world Message-ID: <JKH.93Nov15003742@whisker.lotus.ie> NNTP-Posting-Host: whisker.lotus.ie A number of people have talked about FreeBSD's teething troubles with shared libs, most comments being rather unfair (to say the least) considering that we've only recently (less than 2 weeks) started on integrating them! In any case, I am very pleased to report success with all but /bin and /sbin compiled shared (these two being deliberately compiled static so as to give the user a reasonable chance of resurrecting themselves in case of difficultly). I've also got all of X compiled shared, and without .sa files, thanks to some recent work by Paul Kranenburg who should also be highly commended at this point for keeping his own work neutral and remaining admirably aloof from all the political mudslinging. I don't know how he does it, but I'm taking notes! :-) Some stats: A `df' on my machine before installing anything shared: Filesystem 512-blocks Used Avail Capacity Mounted on /dev/sd0a 926622 732286 101672 88% / And after installing all system and X binaries (core XFree86 2.0) shared: Filesystem 512-blocks Used Avail Capacity Mounted on /dev/sd0a 926622 717396 116562 86% / Doesn't look like much, but 15K blocks is still 15K blocks, and I should easily be able to get another 20MB or so off of this once my enormous collection of X11 contrib compiled stuff and xview clients are also compiled shared. Under the microscope, some other size information (random sampling): Before: -rwxr-xr-x 1 root 671744 Oct 21 01:32 /usr/X386/bin/bitmap -rwxr-xr-x 1 root 589824 Oct 21 01:34 /usr/X386/bin/xedit -rwsr-xr-x 1 root 643072 Oct 21 01:35 /usr/X386/bin/xterm -rwxr-xr-x 1 root 188416 Oct 21 01:35 /usr/X386/bin/xwininfo After: -rwxr-xr-x 1 root 81920 Nov 15 00:23 /usr/X386/bin/bitmap -rwxr-xr-x 1 root 12288 Nov 15 00:24 /usr/X386/bin/xedit -rwsr-xr-x 1 root 143360 Nov 15 00:24 /usr/X386/bin/xterm -rwxr-xr-x 1 root 24576 Nov 15 00:24 /usr/X386/bin/xwininfo As you can see, the Xt/Xaw based applications win significantly, and I have similar hopes for the xview stuff when I start in on getting it done shared next.. Overall performance is excellent, with start-up times (at least perceived, as this is difficult to time) as good as or better than they were before. Space savings are, of course, immense. Kudos and great thanks to Paul Kranenburg for his (not FreeBSD's, not NetBSD's) excellent work here on the shared library code, and to Uwe Arndt who's original XFree86 patches gave me a place to start. This is great stuff! Jordan -- (Jordan K. Hubbard) jkh@violet.berkeley.edu, jkh@al.org, jkh@whisker.lotus.ie