On Wed, Oct 16, 2013 at 9:44 AM, Jan Kratochvil <jan.kratochvil@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > What exactly bothers you? It (generally) speeds up programs startup. > > As a summary I see prelink has some bugs: > * -y has false mismatches: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=666143 > * %preun does not unprelink: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=841434 > * It has a bug that in some cases it slows down the startup (seen on mplayer). > https://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/devel/2013-October/190274.html > * It possibly should disable itself to run on very low memory systems as > there can be running multiple copies of prelinked/unprelinked binaries. > > Plus prelink is affected by bugs in other packages: > * cron: It should not run cron.daily(+weekly...) if the user is not idle or > if the system is running on battery > * systemd should restart daemons which are updated. For example > openssh-server restarts itself in %postuninstall but not all packages do so. > * tripwire/rkhunter/...: System verificators should use 'prelink -y'. > * FIPS: It should unprelink the whole system if it needs it that way. I'm not bothered about prelink requiring extra work, you're right that it is a toolchain optimization work like any other in that regard; but knowing about these bugs and not having enough people interested in fixing them does bother me. > There is remaining security request to have all binaries PIE. IIUC it is for > the case of untrusted files stored at local filesystem accessed by for example > gzip where exploits could be reduced by having for example even gzip PIE. > I do not find it worth the small performance hit but people may disagree. FESCo has discussed using PIE for all binaries on x86_64 fairly recently (https://fedorahosted.org/fesco/ticket/1113), and rejected it due to the performance impact; AFAICS removing prelink would _not_ change the rationale used to make that decision. Mirek -- devel mailing list devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel Fedora Code of Conduct: http://fedoraproject.org/code-of-conduct
