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From: rick@vox.trystero.com (Richard E. Nickle)
Newsgroups: comp.os.386bsd.questions
Subject: Re: What is the /stand directory?
Date: 16 Jan 1995 01:24:53 GMT
Organization: The Trystero System
Lines: 43
Message-ID: <3fcht6$dac@sundog.tiac.net>
References: <3f890vINN1f2@anvil.ugrad.cs.ubc.ca>
NNTP-Posting-Host: vox.trystero.com
In article <3f890vINN1f2@anvil.ugrad.cs.ubc.ca>,
Markus Meister <h5h1@ugrad.cs.ubc.ca> wrote:
>Greetings. This may be a silly question, but what is the purpose of the
>/stand directory and the files in it? Also, why are most of the files there
>(I believe ALL the binary files) reported to have a huge size, like
>this excerpt of the output from ls -l:
The purpose of stand is to have a 'standalone' directory where
you can boot your system into single user mode (without mounting
/usr, and other filesystems) and still have a workable system
that you can poke around with.
>-rwxrwxr-x 55 root bin 1224704 Dec 4 09:54 sed*
>-rwxrwxr-x 55 root bin 1224704 Dec 4 09:54 sh*
>-rwxrwxr-x 55 root bin 1224704 Dec 4 09:54 sh-*
>-rwxrwxr-x 55 root bin 1224704 Dec 4 09:54 slattach*
>-rwxrwxr-x 55 root bin 1224704 Dec 4 09:54 sleep*
Well, I hadn't noticed this before, but thanks for pointing
it out. Strictly guesswork (but I'm right, I just know it!)
There's 55 links in there to the same massive binary, that
can take advantage of argv[0] to know what the executor intended
in order to know what to do.
So, that implies they did it this way because:
They didn't want the 'stand' binaries to be dynamically
linked (no /usr/lib directory in single-user mode).
And maybe these reasons (which seem weird to me, but maybe someone
can elaborate)
They didn't want a whole slew of programs in here
(limited inodes?).
Doing it this way implies that the program can be loaded
once into cache and never released (all operations in
this single-user mode run off one always-in-core image)
--
--
Richard Nickle http://www.trystero.com/rick.html