Re: -Bdirect linking patch

[michael meeks <michael dot meeks at novell dot com>]

On Fri, 2005-10-28 at 07:30 -0700, Ulrich Drepper wrote:
> michael meeks wrote:
> > 	So - I have an evily hackish prototype for glibc & binutils that gives
> > me a really nice speedup with relocation processing. It's inspired by
> > the Solaris -Bdirect feature of the same name, and is implemented in the
> > same way - by adding a section containing a 16bit word per .dynsym entry
> > with an index into the libraries DT_NEEDED table, built at library link
> > time.
> 
> Forget it, we have prelinking, which is much more efficient.

	Prelinking doesn't work for dlopened libraries - which accounts for the
vast majority of OO.o code, and an increasing amount of eg. KDE & other
desktop code; and AFAICS it's rather difficult to improve that with
prelinking.

	Furthermore -Bdirect linking requires no regular per-end-user
'prelinking' phase to cope with changed libraries. It is also (as can
perhaps be deduced from the patch) inordinately simple, so shouldn't
complicate & clutter the code too much.

	The hope is that it will remove the anecdotal embarrassments that OO.o
starts quicker under Wine on the same Linux box than natively - due in
large part (I guess) to the linking burning nearly 3 seconds on my
2.8GHz machine. [ and of course faster yet on Win32 ].

	Or am I missing something ?

	Thanks,

		Michael.

-- 
 michael.meeks@novell.com  <><, Pseudo Engineer, itinerant idiot