Re:The Slackware Way (2012)
by specialist on Friday April 30, 2021 @11:25AM
(#26994644)
I just had a stupid, weird notion:
File systems dedupe now, right? IIRC, per storage block.
What if linkers aligned dependencies to the storage block boundaries?
Then let the file system find and dedupe those libraries.
A bit like applying the alignment of data structures in memory (to optimize performance) at the expense of size inefficiency.
Re:The Slackware Way (2012)
by jjtheblunt on Friday April 30, 2021 @02:16PM
(#26997208)
> File systems dedupe now
Huh? is there a citation to that assertion perhaps for a particular instance?
as far as I know zfs[1] and btrfs[2] support dedupe.
1 - https://constantin.glez.de/2010/03/16/opensolaris-zfs-dedupl...
> I never understood why a.out binaries went out of fashion :(
Storage was expensive. The promise of ELF was shared libraries. The idea was that a lot of libraries are used by a lot of programs so splitting the code between the main program and the shared library is a good thing.
The idea has not lived to its promise. Shared libraries in OSS are tending to became a DLL hell. There are also a lot of libraries with duplicated functionality which makes things even worse.
> Fun fact: older versions of Slackware were using EGCS instead of GCC compilers.
This was a good thing. Just like today with llvm. GCC was resting in its 7 day and nobody bothered to update it for the new stuff. Then EGCS came out and gave GCC a kick in the butt, helping to continue.