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Date: Mon, 24 Apr 1995 15:44:41 -0600
From: Nate Williams <nate@trout.sri.MT.net>
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In-Reply-To: "Jordan K. Hubbard" <jkh@freefall.cdrom.com>
       "Re: benchmark hell.." (Apr 24,  2:30pm)
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To: "Jordan K. Hubbard" <jkh@freefall.cdrom.com>
Subject: Re: benchmark hell..
Cc: roberto@blaise.ibp.fr (Ollivier Robert), hackers@FreeBSD.org
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> > Actually, folks I have talked to have given me the exact opposite
> > report.  And some people on the newsgroups have complained about the
> > switch to ELF binaries since they are significantly slower than the
> > original shlib implementation.
> > 
> > I think our shlib implementatio is still probably slower than the ELF
> > shlib stuff, but I suspect it's not much anymore.
> 
> And as I told H.J. Lu, one of the Linux shared lib developers, it's
> not really fair to compare Linux/ELF to ANYTHING in the FreeBSD camp
> until Linux/ELF is truly in wide circulation.  Since the Slackware
> distribution currently leads the market in overall Linux users
> (something like 60-70%), I'll be willing to talk about Linux and ELF
> in the same breath when Slackware goes ELF, but not a moment before.

As long as we're talking about the Linux folks, I found it amusing in
talks with H.J. how he didn't understand our shlib implementation, and
wondered why we didn't switch to using ELF.  He kept trying to show me
out easy it was to build an ELF shlib and it was the *exact* same steps
as we have been using since the original implementation.  The only
difference in the entire process is that we use the command 'ld
-Bshareable' and they used a 'gcc -someother option' to build the
library.  It ended up being the same command sooner or later, but I
found it amusing none-the-less.

For him the ELF transition made his workload orders of magnitude easier.


Nate