Re: Reduce function call costs on ELF platforms

Hi,

On 2021-11-23 17:28:08 +0100, Peter Eisentraut wrote:
> On 22.11.21 23:32, Tom Lane wrote:
> > > The easier approach for this class of issues is to use the linker option
> > > -Bsymbolic.
> > I don't recall details, but we've previously rejected the idea of
> > trying to use -Bsymbolic widely; apparently it has undesirable
> > side-effects on some platforms. See commit message for e3d77ea6b
> > (hopefully there's some detail in the email thread [1]). It sounds
> > like you're not actually proposing that, but I thought it would be
> > a good idea to note the hazard here.
>
> Also, IIRC, -Bsymbolic was once frowned upon by packaging policies, since it
> prevents use of LD_PRELOAD. I'm not sure what the current thinking there
> is, however.

It doesn't break some (most?) of the uses of LD_PRELOAD. In particular, it
doesn't break things like replacing the malloc implementation. When do you
have a symbol that you want to override *inside* your library (executables
already bind to their own symbols at compile time)? I've seen that for
replacing buggy functions in closed source things, but that's about it?

Greetings,

Andres Freund