Preventing preemption of 'protected' symbols in GNU ld 2.26

[Cary Coutant]

> Did you look at what the costs were in startup time and dirty pages by using
> copy relocations? What do you do if the size of the definition changes in a
> new version of the library?

There wouldn't be a measurable cost in dirty pages; the copied objects
are simply allocated in bss in the executable.

Startup time wasn't a concern either, simply because COPY relocations
weren't the real issue. We had to support an *occasional* COPY
relocation in order to enable -fPIE to access globals directly rather
than through the GOT. These would be the same COPY relocations that
the apps would have already been using in non-PIE mode (things like
stdin, stdout, and stderr, e.g.).

The size of an object is baked into the ABI when a COPY relocation is
used, so any change in size is an ABI change (often handled, as HJ
pointed out, with versioning). For a lot of common COPY relocations,
that's not really an issue, because both the size and the layout are
baked in through macros like putc() and getc().

-cary