UNIX admin writes:
> > That wouldn't actually help. In fact it makes it
> > WORSE not better,
> > static linking in the general case decreases sharing,
> > increases binary
> > sizes makes patching more complex and increases
> > memory requirements not
> > decreases it.
>
> I know all this. Inspite of that, I believe static linking just for the
> installer is acceptable.
I agree that it'd be "acceptable" in the sense that the miniroot isn't
the operational system, and tricks there could possibly be defended,
so long as they don't require extreme (and thus unsupportable)
contortions.
I seriously doubt that it'd reduce any RAM usage, though, so exploring
it seems pointless. The RAM usage is mostly a factor of the amount of
code and data on the disk, not the way in which it's linked. In fact,
static linking is *worse* because there are no shared copies of .text
segments.
> Let's spin this around some: I've read quite a number of reasons why it
> shouldn't be done. Do you have a better idea on how to bring the ridiculous
> requirement of 512MB of RAM just to install Solaris down?
Yes. There are two notches of RAM that can be cut down, depending on
how much effort can be expended and the desired outcome.
1. Finish Caiman and rid the miniroot of the vestiges of the old
installers and upgrade systems. They're baggage, and the sooner
we jettison them, the sooner we pare down the required miniroot
size.
2. Give up on the idea of having a fancy, nice-looking, loaded with
features installer. Go back to a simple, plain-text,
curses(3CURSES)-based, circa-1981 system.
> The end result is, no matter how you slice it and dice it, that Solaris can't
> readily be installed on systems that have less than half a gigabyte of RAM.
> And that's the "slim" installer! Now, I know you guys at Sun have
> super-di-duper shining U20s and U25s, but there's literally milions of people
> out there which have systems sitting around which would make for nice little
> servers with 256MB of RAM... if they could only install Solaris on them.
I'm not in that group, but my understanding of the trade-off here is
that they're deliberately abandoning old systems. We're no longer
designing for the "3M" systems that were the holy grail when I was in
school, and design points change over time.
("3M" doesn't refer to the midwest company. It means one megabyte of
RAM, one million instructions per second, and one million [monochrome]
pixels.)
--
James Carlson, Solaris Networking <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sun Microsystems / 35 Network Drive 71.232W Vox +1 781 442 2084
MS UBUR02-212 / Burlington MA 01803-2757 42.496N Fax +1 781 442 1677
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