Comments on: Linux: Why Loading Binaries From Disk Sucks

By: Eero Tamminen

Eero Tamminen — Sat, 01 May 2010 11:56:00 +0000

Or is the prelink issue that you load things with dlopen() i.e. link them (e.g. huge extensions like Flashplayer) at run-time so that prelink cannot know about them?

By: Frank Ch. Eigler

Frank Ch. Eigler — Thu, 25 Mar 2010 14:46:31 +0000

If your prelink issue is this one: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=504949
then you can try kludging around it by
# rm /etc/prelink.conf.d/nss-prelink.conf
and rerunning prelink.

By: Frank Ch. Eigler

Frank Ch. Eigler — Thu, 25 Mar 2010 13:17:23 +0000

http://www.google.com/search?q=ld.so%20madvise

This idea has been around for at least five years. If this were a clear win, I wonder why it’s not already done.

By: Frank Ch. Eigler

Frank Ch. Eigler — Thu, 25 Mar 2010 13:02:47 +0000

Can you give a reference to why prelinking doesn’t work on your machine?

By: glandium

glandium — Thu, 25 Mar 2010 07:24:59 +0000

2 won’t work with ASLR (Address space layout randomization).

By: Bradley Baetz

Bradley Baetz — Thu, 25 Mar 2010 02:14:46 +0000

Prelinking doesn’t work on firefox under fedora because nss disables prelinking (it apparently gets in the way of its FIPS checks which md5sum the libraries internally)

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=504949

Try removing /etc/prelink.conf.d/nss-softokn-prelink.conf, touch /var/lib/misc/prelink.force and run /etc/cron.daily/prelink again

(You’ll have to do this after any NSS upgrade)

If you’re using your own firefox build rather than the fedora RPM, then I don’t think that prelinking will help at all because prelink only modifies the system libraries, not whatever you have in ~/lib. Not 100% sure of that, though.