Prelinking of shared libraries

[Martin v. Loewis]

> So what relocations can benefit from this?  Let's look at i386 and
> take libkdecore.so as an example, other architectures should be
> similar.

How did you get these data? Looking at libkdecore.so.2.0.0, as
distributed with SuSE 7.0 (klibs-1.1.2-160), I get

[ 6] .rel.data         REL             00013898 013898 001a50 08   A  2  10  4
[ 7] .rel.eh_frame     REL             000152e8 0152e8 002570 08   A  2  11  4
[ 8] .rel.gcc_except_t REL             00017858 017858 00b2b0 08   A  2  12  4
[ 9] .rel.got          REL             00022b08 022b08 0005c8 08   A  2  15  4
[10] .rel.plt          REL             000230d0 0230d0 0016a0 08   A  2   c  4

Classifying the individual relocations, I get

R_386_RELATIVE: 7219
R_386_32:        539
R_386_GLOB_DAT:  185
R_386_JUMP_SLOT: 724

> So out of 4078 relocations we could get rid of 793 - and only of the
> cheapest relocations.  

In summary, I find that out of 8667 relocations, prelinking the
R_386_RELATIVE ones would save 7219.

That raises two questions: Why do we get different numbers for the
same shared library? And why do I have so many R_386_RELATIVE
relocations when the code should be PIC?

It turns out that most of those relocations are in the .eh_frame and
the .gcc_except_table, so this looks more like a GCC question: Is it
that those tables are not position-independent? If so, C++ programs
would suffer more than C programs.

Furthermore, I don't understand how pre-linking would proceed. It
appears that all you had to do is to define a VMA, and relocate a
certain section to that VMA (updating the sections sh_addr, and the
relocation entries appropriately). Then, the dynamic linker should
attempt to map that section to this VMA; if that succeeds, no
relocations need to be applied. Is that possible? If so, where does
the added complexity that nullifies the performance gain come from?

Regards,
Martin