*BSD News Article 91321


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From: lidl@va.pubnix.com (Kurt J. Lidl)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.bsdi.misc
Subject: Re: BSDI 3.0 Impressive
Date: 16 Mar 1997 21:49:55 -0500
Organization: UUNET Technologies -- Fairfax, Virginia, USA
Lines: 39
Message-ID: <5gibgj$bu7@arrow.va.pubnix.com>
References: <332849E6.71CA@cet.co.jp> <332824B1.6B5F@opengroup.org> <E6zpJB.Iv0@news.interactive.net> <5giab8$l8h@vanbc.wimsey.com>
NNTP-Posting-Host: arrow.va.pubnix.com
Xref: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au comp.unix.bsd.bsdi.misc:6362

In <5giab8$l8h@vanbc.wimsey.com>, John Henders <jhenders@wimsey.com> wrote:
>In <E6zpJB.Iv0@news.interactive.net>, <ritz@interactive.net> writes:
>
>>>Does it have shared libraries yet?
>
>>It's had shared libraries for years.  Where have you been?
>>I've been using them since the release of BSDI 2.1.
>
>Shared libraries came out with 2.0 actually.

I believe the real question that should have been asked is,
"Does it have dynamically linked libraries yet?", not "shared
libraries".

BSD/OS certainly has shared libraries, but doesn't have dynamically
linked libraries, even in the 3.0 release.  The difference?

shared libraries --> multiple programs can share the same copy of
the mapped text for libraries, resulting in very efficient use of
memory space

dynamically linked libraries --> each program's unresolved list of
symbols is bound to a library symbol at run time.  Under SunOS,
this is done via an exec of the /usr/lib/ld.so program, which
attempts to do this resolving by examining the list of libraries
that was stored in the program.  Normally, the list of libraries
is the standard list of system libraries, which happen to be shared.

One of the other restrictions of the BSDi scheme is that in the
case of the shared libraries, they are mapped into the same virtual
memory locations in each process.  With most dynamic linking
solutions, the processes don't have to map the shared libraries
into the same virtual address locations.

-Kurt
-- 
/* Kurt J. Lidl (lidl@va.pubnix.com) UUCP: <Earth>!uunet!lidl */
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