"Greg A. Woods" <woods@weird.com> writes:

> BTW, if NetBSD (and the rest of the GCC-using free OS projects) really
> do hope to remain relevant in the OS world while at the same time
> continuing to try to tout dynamic runtime linkers as a benefit, then
> they absolutely must work much faster and much harder towards providing
> proper pre-binding support (ala Darwin et al) along with much better
> facilities to help increase the locality of reference in massive
> dynamic-linked address spaces.  Without such enhancements none of the
> very real and ever-present and ever-recurring costs of dynamic linking
> can ever be mitigated.

I don't want to get drawn into this discussion, but I do want to note
that recent versions of GNU/Linux do include a prelink application,
which adds pre-binding support to executables.  That application
should be fairly portable to Unix systems, although of course it does
not good if the runtime linker does not understand it.  I don't think
prelink has a regular project page, but the source code can be found
here:
    ftp://people.redhat.com/jakub/prelink/

Ian