symbol relocation during dynamic loading

[Ian Lance Taylor]

Robert Schweikert <Robert.Schweikert@abaqus.com> writes:

> OK, this leads me to a follow up question.If the number of relocations
> does not change the improved load performance I am hoping to achieve
> would be based on hopefully shorter hash buckets and fewer string
> comparisons. Is this correct?

Yes.  Also, a R_*_RELATIVE relocation is more efficient for the
dynamic linker than other relocations, because it does not require any
symbol lookup at all.

> And is there a way to extract this
> information from the linker?

Well, not from the linker as such.  You can objdump -R and examine the
dynamic relocation types.  And you can use objdump -T and examine the
size of the dynamic symbol table.  And you can use readelf -I to get a
histogram of bucket list length for the hash table.

Ian