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Ask HN: Why are Windows security updates larger than the ENTIRETY of Windows?
A vanilla install of Windows XP uses 1.2GB of disk space.
But 83 critical security patches need to be downloaded
and installed right away. These add 5.3GB to the system.
That's 4 times as big as all of Windows XP!
(This is all according to a recent RISKS article.)
I'm reminded of the story of how a statically-linked
"Hello, World" program was over a megabyte. It turned out
that all the Unicode characters were thrown into libc.
I'm thinking that there has got to be a similarly interesting
reason as to how security patches can be massively bigger than
the OS itself.
- cperciva 15y agoThere's probably multiple updates affecting the same code, with the effect that bits are downloaded which get replaced without ever being used.
- alister 15y agoSo you're saying that (eg.) security patches 1 to 83 download eighty-three slightly different versions of file X, only the last of which is used. Presumably versions 1 to 82 shouldn't be saved -- and I don't see evidence in XP that they are for security updates. The original article -- here, by the way, http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/26.47.html#subj8 http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/26.47.html#subj8 says that the final result is 6.5GB of hard drive space for a patched XP install.
- cperciva 15y agoI believe that Windows keeps patch downloads stored somewhere even after they have been extracted and installed.