Date: Fri, 5 Jan 1996 13:17:03 -0800 (PST) From: Jake Hamby <jehamby@lightside.com> To: Nate Williams <nate@rocky.sri.MT.net> Cc: "Kaleb S. KEITHLEY" <kaleb@x.org>, hackers@freefall.freebsd.org Subject: Re: Demand loading (Re: FreeBSD, Zappa & PCI) Message-ID: <Pine.AUX.3.91.960105131058.22771A-100000@covina.lightside.com> In-Reply-To: <199601051550.IAA04120@rocky.sri.MT.net>
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On Fri, 5 Jan 1996, Nate Williams wrote: > > I'm keen on ELF so that I don't have to compile everything in a library > > twice to get shared libraries. I'd also be keen to get rid of ldconfig > > and ld.so.cache. (Am I only doing this because I've never questioned the > > shared-lib build rules we were given for X11?) > > AFAIK, you *don't* have to re-compiled everything twice to get shared > libraries. You can use PIC code in the libraries if you want, although > you will take a performance hit for using PIC code in static > executables. If Linux is doing this, then they *should* be compiling > stuff without -PIC because of performance. Right, ELF is identical to FreeBSD's existing a.out shared library system in terms of performance/ease-of-use. Either way, you want to compile each file twice (for best performance on static libraries). I think the only reason Linux jumped to ELF is because their old jump-table system of building shared libraries (which didn't require -fPIC because each library was assigned a different fixed offset, but on the other hand required a lot of magic numbers and hand-holding) just sucked so bad. Besides, Linux's ELF isn't even COMPATIBLE with SVR4, neither the standard shared libraries or even statically linked stuff will work (except in the ibcs2 emulation that FreeBSD has as well), AND the Linux upgrade to ELF was somewhat traumatic for everyone. So I vote no on the whole idea (of switching FreeBSD), I'm 100% happy with our existing a.out system and see NO reason to change. Just my $0.02 before everyone gets too excited about this dumb idea without realizing what it involves and how minimal the gain would be. ---Jake
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