RFC: Implementation of ELF sharable sections

[H. J. Lu]

On Fri, Jan 05, 2007 at 08:53:07AM +0000, Christoph Hellwig wrote:
> On Thu, Jan 04, 2007 at 03:31:46PM -0800, H. J. Lu wrote:
> > Here is one implementation of ELF sharable section proposal:
> > 
> > http://groups-beta.google.com/group/generic-abi/browse_thread/thread/bca08f6560f61b0d
> > 
> > Several people have expressed interests. I post it here for comments.
> > I used OS specific values. If we get consensus, I can change those
> > values to generic range.
> 
> For Linux pleases don't put this into the ABI until the OS actually
> supports this type of memory.  Which I doubt it will anytime soon as
> the concept is rather oddly defined and no one posted a kernel-level
> design and implementation yet.

Kernel support may be useful, but not strictly required.  Consider
shared libraries with sharable segment, they are loaded by dynamic
linker, not kernel.

Another thing, a sharabale segment isn't a PT_LOAD segment. Dynamic
linker doesn't have to know it for applications to run correctly. So
it is backward compatible.

H.J.