On 11/07/2011 03:56 PM, Eli Bendersky wrote: > I should also add that my intention here is just curiosity. I was > trying to understand how PIC code works on x64, and got intrigued by > the fact that GCC seemingly forces me to use PIC code for shared > libraries on this architecture, unlike x86 where non-PIC code in > shared libraries is fine. The x86 shared library loader has a kludge where pages that contain non-PIC code are remapped and relocated, so every process ends up with its own copy of each relocated page. This is provided for compatibility with older libraries. x86_64 is a new architecture, so it wasn't necessary to provide backwards compatibility for non-PIC libraries. Andrew.
