Re: PATCH: Fix prelink for mips

[Jakub Jelinek <jakub at redhat dot com>]

On Thu, Jan 17, 2002 at 03:00:04PM -0800, H . J . Lu wrote:
> Some patch is necessary since mips doesn't have elf_machine_rela. You
> can define a dummy elf_machine_rela in sysdeps/mips/dl-machine.h. But
> ...

Is it that hard to just define it to print a message that prelinking is not
supported?

> > Whether or not it can be implemented on MIPS is another question.
> > Prelinking has advantages over SGI's quickstart so it's certainly
> > desirable to try implementing preload.  If this is not possible we
> > still can move the file or make other changes which allow using it in
> > all situations.  It should not be necessary today, though.
> 
> The problem is the MIPS ABI is written for quickstart. It is very
> different from other ELF ABIs. I don't believe we can implement
> prelink with that ABI.

prelink breaks the native ABI on most arches if not LD_BIND_NOW=1
(the thing is that if you have a prelinked library or binary, you
have to do some action to undo .plt prelinking if prelinking cannot
be used). Plus on ia32 and arm it breaks the ABI by sometimes using RELA
instead of the mandated REL relocs (though this is quite rare).
I don't see anything which would make prelinking impossible to implement on
mips (aside from time constraints).

> However, I do believe we can implement quickstart similar to prelink.

At least how I understand quickstart, if you have any conflicts, it is very
costly.

	Jakub