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Stali: A new static Linux distribution

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Re: Stali: A new static Linux distribution

#141

Post by qwertyuiop924 »

Annatar wrote: post #93

Ignore FHS of Linux, it simply sucks. Wow. Just wow. So these guys don't understand UNIX. Like they're going to do it better than the fathers of UNIX at AT&T (who came up with the specification on which the FHS is based). Yeah, OK. Achieve better performance than any other x86_64 or arm distribution, as only statically linked binaries are used Wow. So not only do they not understand UNIX, but now every process will h…

They're plan9 elitists. They're frankly a lot like you, except their system of choice is plan9, not solaris.

And on Linux, the FHS does kind of suck: there's no difference between /lib and /usr/lib, or /share and /usr/share, because we don't have a separation between OS userland and external userland, /sbin is rarely used for its intended purpose, and /opt is just weird. Honestly, you should just kill most of the cruft, symlink / to /usr/ or vice versa, so we only have one of all of them, and leave /usr/local as it is, because we need it for software installed outside the package manager.

Re: Stali: A new static Linux distribution

#142

Post by pjmlp »

NzNz wrote: post #137
pjmlp wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The irony of the eroding the UNIX philosophy from Linux is that most real UNIX systems, meaning AIX, HP-UX, Solaris, NeXTSTep (cough macOS), Tru64,... do have something similar to systemd. Sometimes shouting "UNIX philosophy" in GNU/Linux forums reminds me of emigrants that keep traditions of their home countries alive that are long out of fashion back home.

AIX, HP-UX, Solaris and NeXTStep were not written by the original authors of Unix and its philosophy. Linux has always been closer to the philosophy than many of these, actually. So much so that it has imported concepts from the successor of Unix, Plan9. Linux's procfs which exposes sysinfo as files within the filesystem is a concept taken from Plan9, which was the OS people like Ken Thompson and Rob Pike envisioned…

Actually the only thing I find positive about Plan9 is that it gave birth to Inferno and Limbo, both of which don't have much to do with UNIX philosophy.

Those that worship Plan 9 as the UNIX culture, should actually be aware what the authors think about UNIX.

"I didn't use Unix at all, really, from about 1990 until 2002, when I joined Google. (I worked entirely on Plan 9, which I still believe does a pretty good job of solving those fundamental problems.) I was surprised when I came back to Unix how many of even the little things that were annoying in 1990 continue to annoy today. In 1975, when the argument vector had to live in a 512-byte-block, the 6th Edition system would often complain, 'arg list too long'. But today, when machines have gigabytes of memory, I still see that silly message far too often. The argument list is now limited somewhere north of 100K on the Linux machines I use at work, but come on people, dynamic memory allocation is a done deal!

I started keeping a list of these annoyances but it got too long and depressing so I just learned to live with them again. We really are using a 1970s era operating system well past its sell-by date. We get a lot done, and we have fun, but let's face it, the fundamental design of Unix is older than many of the readers of Slashdot, while lots of different, great ideas about computing and networks have been developed in the last 30 years. Using Unix is the computing equivalent of listening only to music by David Cassidy. "

https://interviews.slashdot.org/story/04/10/18/1153211/rob-p...

Re: Stali: A new static Linux distribution

#143

Post by qwertyuiop924 »

qume wrote: post #24

Shocked that it takes a fringe project to be promoting static linking and cleaning up the filesystem. Would love to hear the linux grandfathers chime in...

Arch already pretty much does the same thing this does. Of course, Arch defaults to using systemd, although it's easy to change...

Re: Stali: A new static Linux distribution

#144

Post by tychuz »

morganvachon wrote: post #14
simophin wrote: post #3

I still don't understand why systemd sucks

That's a loaded question, and I'm only qualified to answer from my perspective and experience. My biggest gripe with it has always been that it is alpha-quality software, even today, that has a central role in an otherwise mature OS ecosystem. It has been widely adopted (some would say forced or tricked into adoption by a few distros) and therefore all the major Linux distributions are now running at an alpha level w…

Boo hoo, systemd makes users happy, works perfectly, easy to configure, I love it on my ArchLinux server, etc etc, but it's NOT THE UNIX WAY SO IT SUCKS AND WE MUST KILL IT WITH FIRE.

Who knew - UNIX way is outdated and shit, so doing something like systemd makes Linux a better OS. Screw unix way init systems, and screw unix way /usr/bin, /usr/local/bin, /bin, /sbin and any other bin folders scattered everywhere, it's about time 1980s unix way dies and in 2020s we will hopefuly have a fucking /Applications folder.

Re: Stali: A new static Linux distribution

#145

Post by JdeBP »

qznc wrote: post #124
paulddraper wrote: post #28

I really like the idea of static linking. Then I think about how I'd patch the next inevitable openssl bug. Then I don't like it as much.

I guess the "suckless" answer would be to not use OpenSSL.

Per http://suckless.org/rocks you appear to have guessed correctly.

Re: Stali: A new static Linux distribution

#146

Post by viraptor »

Retr0spectrum wrote: post #109
viraptor wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In stali, or in general? For stali there's a slightly confusing FAQ entry: http://sta.li/faq / "Aren’t statically linked executables less secure?" > it is simple to use position-independent code in static executables and (assuming a modern kernel that supports address randomization for executables) fully position-independent executables are easily created on all modern operating systems. [...] Thus we consider this a…

I'm assuming that even with PIE, the relative positioning of the statically linked libraries is constant. That means you only need a single address leak to be able to ROP to anywhere.

That's how I understand it as well (it's a single rel/ro segment). But then again, in most cases you only need any address anyway. Rop gadgets are everywhere...

Re: Stali: A new static Linux distribution

#147

Post by morganvachon »

tychuz wrote: post #144
morganvachon wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a loaded question, and I'm only qualified to answer from my perspective and experience. My biggest gripe with it has always been that it is alpha-quality software, even today, that has a central role in an otherwise mature OS ecosystem. It has been widely adopted (some would say forced or tricked into adoption by a few distros) and therefore all the major Linux distributions are now running at an alpha level w…

Boo hoo, systemd makes users happy, works perfectly, easy to configure, I love it on my ArchLinux server, etc etc, but it's NOT THE UNIX WAY SO IT SUCKS AND WE MUST KILL IT WITH FIRE. Who knew - UNIX way is outdated and shit, so doing something like systemd makes Linux a better OS. Screw unix way init systems, and screw unix way /usr/bin, /usr/local/bin, /bin, /sbin and any other bin folders scattered everywhere, it'…

> WE MUST KILL IT WITH FIRE.

You know, it's funny, I never said that, in fact I said once it matures systemd is actually a good idea.

Perhaps you're projecting a bit?

Re: Stali: A new static Linux distribution

#148

Post by talideon »

jtietema wrote: post #37
giovannibajo1 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You'd run "pkg-manager upgrade", just like you do with dynamic linking.

Yep but now instead of fetching 1 updated library, you depend on everybody and their cat to rebuild their binaries and publish updated versions.

This is why binary patching exists: http://www.daemonology.net/bsdiff/

Re: Stali: A new static Linux distribution

#149

Post by JdeBP »

qume wrote: post #24

Shocked that it takes a fringe project to be promoting static linking and cleaning up the filesystem. Would love to hear the linux grandfathers chime in...

You should rather be shocked that the Linux world still believes that it is anywhere near this century when it comes to modernizing the filesystem hierarchy.

* NeXTSTEP had ~/Apps, /LocalLibrary, /LocalApps, and so forth back in the early 1990s.

* The "/usr merge" first happened in AT&T Unix System 5 Release 4. SunOS 5 (a.k.a. Solaris 2) introduced it a few years after NeXTSTEP introduced its directory hierarchy. AIX gained it with version 3.2 in 1992.

* Daniel J. Bernstein's /package hierarchy (for package management without the need for conflict resolution) has been around since the turn of the century. Their major problem was the idea that one had to register things with what was to most of the world just some bloke on another continent. But they had concepts like a hierarchical package naming scheme ("admin/", "mail/", &c.), self-contained build trees with versioned names (allowing for side-by-side installation of multiple versions of a package amongst other things), and an "index" directory full of symbolic links.

* * http://cr.yp.to/slashpackage.html

* * http://cr.yp.to/slashcommand.html

Previous Hacker News discussions with more: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10356933 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11647304

Re: Stali: A new static Linux distribution

#150

Post by cheiVia0 »

smegel wrote: post #50
jtietema wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep but now instead of fetching 1 updated library, you depend on everybody and their cat to rebuild their binaries and publish updated versions.

You would thing a distro like this would be more like gentoo...you recompile stuff as needed (which for openssl means almost everything).

Gentoo is dynamically linked, so you only recompile if there's an ABI break - a major version - not a patch/minor release. And, you only recompile the stuff that directly links to it.

With static linking, you literally need to recompile everything that uses the library in any form, for every single change. So of there's a security fix in openssl and LibreOffice uses openssl, you need to recompile LibreOffice. If QEMU uses libssh2 which uses openssl, you need to recompile QEMU, even though it doesn't use openssl directly. With Gentoo you just recompile openssl and that's it.

And if there a fix to glibc, you need to recompile EVERYTHING because everything would be statically linked to it.

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