Our rationale for encouraging Gordon is as follows:
1. 4.x upgrade path: As we approach 5-STABLE, a lot of users might want to upgrade from 4-STABLE. Historically in 4.x, the / partition has been very modest in size. One just simply cannot cram the bloat that has grown in 5.x into a 4.x partition scheme. Of course there is the venerable 'dump - clean install - restore' scheme, but we were looking for something a little more user-friendly.
Of course, making / dynamic results in added complication of removing old libraries from /usr/lib, now that some of them have moved to /lib...
3. Binary security updates: there is a lot of interest in providing a
binary update mechanism for doing security updates. Having a dynamic
root means that vulnerable libraries can be updated without having to
update all of the static binaries that might use them.
As far as I'm concerned, this is a non-issue. Identifying which static binaries need to be replaced is now a solved problem, replacing them is easy, and if binary patches are used, there is effectively no impact on bandwidth usage either.
On the issue of performance, however: I know people have benchmarked fork-bombs, but has anyone done benchmarks with moderate numbers of long-lived, library-intensive, processes? It seems to me that dynamic linking could have caching advantages.
Colin Percival
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