Re: Dynamic linking

[David Leimbach <leimy2k@xxxxxxx>]

On Nov 30, 2003, at 5:00 PM, Simon 'corecode' Schubert wrote:

> Lately Michel Talon told:
>
> > Those who follow freebsd-current know that there has been an epic
> > thread about the slowness of dynamic linking in FreeBSD, in which John
> > Dyson and Matt Dillon sent some posts. I have been told by an OpenBSD
> > developer that they have introduced a cache of the position of the
> > dynamic libraries, and that this modification alone was sufficient to
> > improve considerably the startup time of KDE.
>
> I've already considered this when doing prelinking. Like an in-memory
> prelink. I don't know about this cache specifically, but non-root
> generated caches have a security problem. The system needs to 
> guarrantee
> uncompromized cache data when a) first caching data and b) retrieving
> data from the cache.
> This means the cache data and access either needs to be managed somehow
> by a) root or b) kernel. IMO with a secure authenticated messaging
> system as DragonFly will be using, this will be much less of a problem
> than with FreeBSD.

KDE used spawned copies of kdeinit that are pre-re-located to an extent 
to help
with the startup of KDE programs... pretty smart hack if you ask me... 
Not sure if that's
what they are currently doing.

> Also, I'd like to work on this area if/when we agree to implement such 
> a
> thing.
>
> cheers
>   simon
>
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