On Mon, 15 Sep 1997, Chris G. Demetriou wrote:

: In my opinion, the 'right' thing to do is make all shared libs
: effectively be dynamically loadable objects, in the dlopen()/.so
: sense.  Then load them, and have a small dynamic linker in the kernel
: (only #ifdef LKM!) which does the right things.

Uh-oh, I'm about to defend SVR4.  I'll go shoot myself now.  :)

Variants of SVR4 do exactly this, and go one step further:  the 'kernel
symbol table' is not determined by the symbol table attached to the end of
an a.out or elf file, but instead you _must_ call a syscall to ask for the
address of a kernel symbol.  IMHO, this is a much "safer" way to do it, and
is only a logical extension of using dlsym style LKMs.  If the mini runtime
linker were to exist in the kernel, it should be trivial to create a syscall
to find a kernel symbol.

=====
== Todd Vierling (Personal tv@pobox.com; Business tv@lucent.com)
== I know you like the Internet, Bobby.  Now go eat your Frosted Flakes.