> Really, the search path stuff shouldn't even be there.  ELF has rpath to
> encode the path to the library so that you don't have to do an expensive
> path search (a.out didn't have rpath, and thus had the expensive path search).

What, pray tell, are you talking about?

There are 3 paths searched:

* LD_LIBRARY_PATH and the executable's rpath
* the module's rpath
* the default path (/usr/lib,/lib)

All of these are part of ELF.

The rpath does not give you a path for each library/module; it gives
you a global search path for all of them.