Wireshark · Wireshark-dev: [Wireshark-dev] Use shared libraries for dissectors?

[Richard Sharpe <realrichardsharpe@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hi folks,

One of the problems I see is that the startup time of Wireshark can be
long because of the size of the Wireshark binary. There are a large
number of protocols in Wireshark now, many of which I don't use. There
is also the initialization time for each of those protocols.

I would like to be able to specify which dissectors I want to load,
and then only load the dissectors I am going to use for my normal
work.

An approach like this would work, it seems to me (and is similar to Samba).

In your preferences (or similar) have something like "load protocol"
where protocol is the name of a .so, like packet-smb.so, or just
smb.so.

We already almost have a single entrypoint for each dissector that
could perform all the needed registration. We could also ship a
default file that loads all the protocols, and people can trim those
they don't want.

-- 
Regards,
Richard Sharpe
(何以解憂？唯有杜康。--曹操)