Fabrice Le Fessant wrote:
> 
> Last year, Mark Hayden and I did some work on dynamic linking of
> native code for Linux. It worked, with few modifications in the
> compiler to generate relocatable code in the ELF format, but the code
> was really big (something like twice the normal size) and really slow
> (about twice slower). 

	Do you know why it was slower??

	Normally, static and load time linkage produce identical code,
and the code doesn't have to be position independent: any code can
be shared, and have distinct per process data at the same virtual
address. Absolute addresses are relocated by patching once at load time.
What's usually required is segmentation (splitting the code into
executable
and data segments).

{I think all this stinks, and is a result of using a stupid language
like C
for systems programming .. but that's another story]

-- 
John (Max) Skaller, mailto:skaller@maxtal.com.au
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