Rebasing dlls - why it is necessary

[steven.obrien2@ntlworld.com]

Harold Hunt wrote:

I have a question: Do you think that rebasing the distributed XFree86 DLL's
would have a positive effect on Cygwin/XFree86's performance/load time?  If
so, perhaps I will look into rebasing the dlls that are in 
our packages. 
Otherwise, I don't suppose I need to do anything at all.  :)

Harold,

Do not bother to rebase the Xfree86 dlls. Although giving each dll a unique, non-overlapping base address should in principle reduce the load time of the dll, and hence the 
startup time for exes linked to the dll, this work is best done post-install for cygwin.

The reason is that to support run-time loading of dlls it will effectively be necessary to rebase all cygwin dlls, 
and we cannot know what dlls are installed on a given 
machine, or what image base they use, when building 
packages. I think there is still a plan to incorporate
rebase functionality into setup.exe once a robust rebasing
algorithm has been devised. See the cygwin-apps list 
archives for details.

Steven







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