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From: daveb@geac.UUCP (Dave Collier-Brown)
Newsgroups: comp.arch,comp.unix.wizards,comp.os.misc
Subject: Re: Shared libraries (Was: Re: Big Programs Hurt Performance)
Message-ID: <1535@geac.UUCP>
Date: Sat, 3-Oct-87 23:30:37 EDT
Article-I.D.: geac.1535
Posted: Sat Oct  3 23:30:37 1987
Date-Received: Tue, 6-Oct-87 04:24:56 EDT
References: <6886@eddie.MIT.EDU) <2501@xanth.UUCP> <2067@sfsup.UUCP> <8650@utzoo.UUCP> <2208@umn-cs.UUCP>
Reply-To: daveb@geac.UUCP (Dave Collier-Brown)
Organization: The little blue rock next to that twinkly star.
Lines: 28
Xref: mnetor comp.arch:2469 comp.unix.wizards:4628 comp.os.misc:260

In article <2208@umn-cs.UUCP> stachour@umn-cs.UUCP writes:
| That's why Multics has had search-paths since day-1.  That's also why it
| has the phrase "-referencing_dir" in its rules, so that programs pointed
| at an old version of a dynamically-linked shared library thereby
| getting the first of a set of routines from that particular version
| of the library will get the rest of the set that match.
| 
| (Multics also has done up-referencing and down-referenceing of data,
| argument-interogation, compatible-incompatible replacements,
| system_library_obsolete, and other ways to handle multiple versions
| of a program, but that's another 20-year old story that few read,
| because it works so well no-one needs to read or change the code.)

  I suspect, from working with a programmer (Andrew Forber) who put
up an almost-virtual-memory system in place of an overlay loader,
that a proper, elegant and even reasonably efficent memory manager of
the Multics sort could be put into Minix without seriously impacting
either its performance or size.

  Yes, I'm suggesting that a page-and-segment manager could be smaller
than a swapper and some bits of the file system associated with it.

 --dave (ever notice that sV and 4.3 are *bigger* than Multics) c-b
-- 
 David Collier-Brown.                 {mnetor|yetti|utgpu}!geac!daveb
 Geac Computers International Inc.,   |  Computer Science loses its
 350 Steelcase Road,Markham, Ontario, |  memory (if not its mind)
 CANADA, L3R 1B3 (416) 475-0525 x3279 |  every 6 months.