Static Linux

I wish Linux would replace dynamic libraries (especially ones referencing specific paths) with a system based on the library&#x27;s hash. Then we could have a single lib folder with 1 copy of each library, and get ourselves out of dependency hell by just making dynamic loading act like static loading. We could even download libraries from the web on the fly, if needed. Heck it would even remove a lot of the need to compile every_single_time because apps could reference binaries.<p>The notion of being able to fix an app by merely upgrading a library it depends on has not worked out in practice. More often than not, when I upgrade a library, I find myself having to upgrade my app’s code because so much has changed. The burden of having to constantly backup, upgrade, manually tweak config files, over and over and over again for days&#x2F;weeks&#x2F;months was SO not worth the few hundred megabytes or whatever dynamic loading was supposed to have saved.

Cool idea. Not enough people seem aware of executable packers like UPX <a href="http://upx.sourceforge.net/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;upx.sourceforge.net&#x2F;</a> though.<p>These are excellent tools to keep the size down when using large static binaries. By compressing the file on disk and decompressing in memory you often wind up with a smaller and sometimes even faster loading (depending on disk IO speed vs decompression speed) package. I got a static Qt binary from 4 MB down to 1.3 with upx --lzma. Very nice stuff.

I have been keeping an eye on this &quot;project&quot; for years and have yet to see anything come of it except lightning talks.<p>suckless.org seems to focus on their web browser and their xterm clone these days, judging by the listserv traffic.

&quot;Of course Ulrich Drepper thinks that dynamic linking is great, but clearly that’s because of his lack of experience and his delusions of grandeur.&quot; I find these kind of comments reflect veerryyy poorly on their authors..

<p><pre><code> &gt; Because dwm is customized through editing its source code, it’s &gt; pointless to make binary packages of it. This keeps its userbase &gt; small and elitist. No novices asking stupid questions. </code></pre> I never understood why the authors of dwm thought this was a &quot;nice&quot; feature of configuration via source code.

An advantage of dynamic libraries is that the memory used to hold the library&#x27;s executable pages can be shared across processes. So using static only binaries will lead to less free memory on the OS.

Apart from the general system management advantages of dynamic libraries, they provide an important extensibility&#x2F;customization mechanism (e.g. <a href="https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/emacs-paper.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.gnu.org&#x2F;software&#x2F;emacs&#x2F;emacs-paper.html</a> for an early mention).<p>High performance computing systems typically use dynamic linking extensively for that. One example: The hooks for profiling and tool support in the MPI standard for parallel programming pretty much depend on an LD_PRELOAD-type mechanism to be useful. Another: You can cope with the mess due to missing policy on BLAS libraries in Fedora&#x2F;EPEL (unlike Debian) by using OpenBLAS replacements for the reference and ATLAS libraries; have them preferred by ld.so.conf and get a worthwhile system-wide speed increase on your Sandybridge nodes with EPEL packages.<p>Anyhow, rebuilding a static system to address a problem with a library ignores all its uses in user programs. The ability to adjust things via properly-engineered dynamic libraries really has a lot more pros than cons in my non-trivial experience. The use of rpath (&quot;ones referencing specific paths&quot;?) is mostly disallowed by packaging rules in the GNU&#x2F;Linux distributions I know, so I&#x27;m not sure where that comment came from, and it tends to defeat the techniques above.

Static linking OpenSSL is probably not a good idea

One downside to static linking is security vulnerabilities. Say, for example that all the programs on your computer that use OpenSSL statically link. When OpenSSL has a security flaw, you have to not only update OpenSSL, but all of those other programs too.

Are there any static BSDs?

I would like to see &quot;static&quot; USE flag in Gentoo for all packages with ability to statically link whole system. Also profiles or env with other libc&#x27;s would be nice. Dunno why they need to crate new distribution instead of expanding ones that are already there.

Stali has been in &#x27;planning&#x27; for as long as I can remember. At least 4 years.

Wonder if it helps with dep hell...