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On Tue, 26 May 2020 10:45:39 -0400 |
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Mike Gilbert <floppym@g.o> wrote: |
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> > Note that having the 'pic' useflag should be considered something |
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> > to be fixed: rewrite the asm in a PIC way. But these days nobody |
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> > has the will to do it since this is mostly an issue on x86+pax, |
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> > both being slowly decreasing. |
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> |
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> Given that PaX has been stripped out of official Gentoo kernels due to |
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> the grsecurity licensing issue, I wonder if there is any other good |
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> reason to keep the "pic" USE flag today. Surely this affects a very |
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> small population of users. |
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I couldn't find any recent reference, but PIC shared libs used to be a |
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QA policy. There's mainly two reasons to it: First is W^X enforcement; |
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non PIC shared libs are refused by the x86_64 linker so a non-issue |
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there, on x86 you need pax to emulate it because the mmu doesn't support |
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the X part; I don't know about other arches. |
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Then there is the small memory waste done because those libs will be |
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loaded COW and thus their "code" is not shared anymore between |
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processes. And the small startup performance hit to |
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perform the relocations. |
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The latter part affects everyone, and the rule of thumb for having a |
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pic useflag (instead of always pic) is that the gain for non-pic asm is |
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better than the loss of non-pic shared libs. This is subjective but |
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usually a no-brainer for multimedia packages. |
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This is probably something to bring up to QA too. |
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