Xinetd resurrection

Steve Grubb sgrubb at redhat.com
Sun Sep 20 16:28:14 UTC 2009


On Saturday 19 September 2009 07:25:13 pm Matej Cepl wrote:
> Steve Grubb, Fri, 18 Sep 2009 08:24:18 -0400:
> > I also think that the reason xinetd came into existence in the first
> > place has long since passed.
> 
> Do you think that Fedora should humbly return with a cap in hand to inetd?

Not at all. These days the only need for xinetd is in memory constrained 
systems. For mainline x86_64 bought with typically 4Gb of main memory, xinetd 
is a thing of the past. That's my point.

If more work is done on xinetd, the new devs should think about how much 
memory any new feature would add. I would look at the functions in the lib 
directory and scuttle anything I could to make xinetd smaller and more memory 
efficient.

I wanted to do some of this in the past where it could use native glibc 
functionality on Linux and portable functions elsewhere. But the project 
leader wanted to use compat functions on all platforms so any bug reports 
aren't platform specific. In any new development, I would forgo supporting the 
Cray, SunOS, and True64 in favor of smaller footprint on modern OS. They can 
still use the old xinetd.

xinetd could be put on a diet and made better. For example, the ident protocol 
is useless from a security PoV. All that code could be dropped. The config 
parser is huge. That code could be dlopened and then dropped once the daemon 
is running.

-Steve




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