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Re: db(3) removal and lastlogx



On Thu, 07 Jun 2012, Joerg Sonnenberger wrote:
The last real consume of the db(3) API in libc is the lastlogx handling in utmpx. Basically, this logs a record in a file indexed by uid. I can think of three different approaches for dealing with this:

(1) Just use a sparse file. This requires by far the least amount of code, just some verification logic for a file header and writing to "uid * size of entry". Writes should be short enough to ensure atomic writes even on NFS. Same for reads. No manual locking needed.

With 32-bit uid_t, the file size could appear to be multiple gigabytes, even though not that much space is actually used. This might confuse people and naive copy or backup processes.

(2) Implement a simple hierachical byte-level index, [...]
(3) Implement on-disk PATRICA lookup. [...]

(4) Use sqlite.

(0) continue to use db(3).

--apb (Alan Barrett)


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