Shared libraries [LWN.net]

Shared libraries

Posted Nov 26, 2025 5:46 UTC (Wed) by Heretic_Blacksheep (subscriber, #169992)
In reply to: Shared libraries by jhoblitt
Parent article: APT Rust requirement raises questions

Cumulative. Imagine having to replace your entire distro 10-15 GB installation every couple of weeks. Then imagine multiplying that by hundreds of thousands and see how fast most distribution infrastructure volunteers throw in their cards. We're not talking about streaming a movie from Netflix, a billion dollar company with distributed media cache servers on nearly every ISP internal WAN. We're talking about Debian, which is volunteer run with volunteered mirror resources. Backbone interconnect data service is a metered service for all ISPs. You want to waste your bandwidth, fine, but don't be so selfish as to volunteer others that are graciously sharing their resources - or don't have resources to waste. Not every end user is so blessed as to having effectively unlimited 200+ Mbit service. Outside of the developed world, and even in some areas of the developed world, that's pretty rare. Even in the US, most residential ISP services have a soft 1 TB/month data cap regardless of bandwidth which has to be shared across all family members. The low cost subsidized plans are usually capped at 25 Mb/sec with much lower data caps - the very people that Linux distributions would benefit the most using recycled hardware because they can't afford fancy gear!

Also people forget the flash drives the vast majority of people use these days for storage have a finite lifetime and that lifetime is steadily getting lower as the number of bits per cell inflates. A typical drive rated for 300 TB write/erase cycles (Samsung 970 EVO rated lifetime) won't last nearly as long if everything were staticly built as it would with a distro with dynamic linking that only had to write a couple of gigabytes of updates a month. I've seen plenty of drives with even lower lifetime ratings on the consumer/enthusiast market. There's no telling the rating on rebranded OEM units (Lenovo, Dell, etc). Dynamic linking leaves a lot more write cycles for user data and browser-like-programs disk cache/system logging/file indexing (the bigger problems with SSD cell burn than rarely changed media files and such).

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Shared libraries

Posted Nov 26, 2025 7:23 UTC (Wed) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]

> Cumulative. Imagine having to replace your entire distro 10-15 GB installation every couple of weeks.

This is a simply ridiculously overblown comparison. The total size of non-kernel-related binaries on my desktop Linux computer is 1Gb. And they don't need to _all_ change every time.

Assuming that ALL of them need to be replaced, that's already an order of magnitude less. But let's roll with it. An unmetered 10GB port is around $200 a month, and an M2 SSD can easily saturate it. If you want to serve static files, that's probably around $300 a month expense.

A 10GB port can serve the 1Gb in about 1 second. So 86400 people daily, and over a month that's 2.5 million people. This is more than the number of users for most small distros.

Shared libraries

Posted Nov 26, 2025 7:33 UTC (Wed) by mb (subscriber, #50428) [Link] (1 responses)

>10-15 GB installation every couple of weeks
>rated for 300 TB write/erase cycles

That's over 400 years of steady updates.

I've yet to see my first SSD failure due to the "small" lifetimes that one can read about everywhere all the time.

I use them since about 15 years ago as system disk and as disks that are continuously being written to since 8 years ago. Not a single failure so far, except for one that was bad out of the box.

I don't say that failures can't happen, but so far SSDs are much *more* reliable than spinning rust for me.

Shared libraries

Posted Dec 4, 2025 17:00 UTC (Thu) by nye (guest, #51576) [Link]

Only actually ~500 full drive writes, but I've been impressed by Sandforce. Shame they went out of business. I've never seen an HDD last nearly this long.

ID# ATTRIBUTE_NAME          FLAG     VALUE WORST THRESH TYPE      UPDATED  WHEN_FAILED RAW_VALUE
  5 Retired_Block_Count     0x0033   093   093   003    Pre-fail  Always       -       608
  9 Power_On_Hours_and_Msec 0x0032   099   099   000    Old_age   Always       -       132110h+35m+45.600s
 12 Power_Cycle_Count       0x0032   100   100   000    Old_age   Always       -       175
174 Unexpect_Power_Loss_Ct  0x0030   000   000   000    Old_age   Offline      -       81
231 SSD_Life_Left           0x0013   089   089   010    Pre-fail  Always       -       1
241 Lifetime_Writes_GiB     0x0032   000   000   000    Old_age   Always       -       32128
242 Lifetime_Reads_GiB      0x0032   000   000   000    Old_age   Always       -       79296