Sysadmins have a love-hate relationship with shared libraries. They save space, they make upgrades easier, and so on. However, they also cause many problems. Sometimes they cause versioning problems (Windows DLLs), security problems, and (at least when they were new) performance problems. I won't go into detail, just mention them on a technical email list and you'll get an earful.
Here's one example that hits me a lot. On my Linux box, if I run an update of Firefox, my current Firefox browser keeps running. However, the next time it needs to load a shared library, it is now loading the upgraded version which is incompatible and my Firefox goes bonkers and/or crashes. On the Mac and Windows this doesn't happen because the installer waits for you to close any Firefox instances before continuing.
Google Chrome browser does its updates in the background while you use it. The user doesn't have to wait for any painful upgrade notification. Instead, the next time they run Chrome they are simply told that they are now running the newest release. I call this a "parent-friendly" feature because the last time I visited my mom much of her software had been asking to be upgraded for months. I wish it could have just upgraded itself and kept my mom's computer more secure. ACM has an article by the Chrome authors about why automatic upgrades are a key security issue. (with graphs of security attacks vs. upgrade statistics)
However, if Google Chrome upgrades itself in place, how does it keep running without crashing? Well, it turns out, they use a technique called the LinuxZygote. The libraries they need are loaded at startup into a process which then fork()s any time they need, for example, a renderer. The Zygote pattern is usually done for systems that have a slow startup time. However, they claim that in their testing there was no performance improvement. They do this to make the system more stable.
Read the (brief) article for more info: LinuxZygote.
Here's one example that hits me a lot. On my Linux box, if I run an update of Firefox, my current Firefox browser keeps running. However, the next time it needs to load a shared library, it is now loading the upgraded version which is incompatible and my Firefox goes bonkers and/or crashes. On the Mac and Windows this doesn't happen because the installer waits for you to close any Firefox instances before continuing.
Google Chrome browser does its updates in the background while you use it. The user doesn't have to wait for any painful upgrade notification. Instead, the next time they run Chrome they are simply told that they are now running the newest release. I call this a "parent-friendly" feature because the last time I visited my mom much of her software had been asking to be upgraded for months. I wish it could have just upgraded itself and kept my mom's computer more secure. ACM has an article by the Chrome authors about why automatic upgrades are a key security issue. (with graphs of security attacks vs. upgrade statistics)
However, if Google Chrome upgrades itself in place, how does it keep running without crashing? Well, it turns out, they use a technique called the LinuxZygote. The libraries they need are loaded at startup into a process which then fork()s any time they need, for example, a renderer. The Zygote pattern is usually done for systems that have a slow startup time. However, they claim that in their testing there was no performance improvement. They do this to make the system more stable.
Read the (brief) article for more info: LinuxZygote.
Hi Tom,
I'm writing a blog post about Aprigo's NINJA's automatic updates, I'm referring back to your blog post, but the link "ACM has an article by the Chrome authors about why automatic upgrades are a key security issue." doesn't work for me...