Re: PostgreSQL and ASLR on Linux

On Wed, Jul 31, 2013 at 4:35 PM, Robert Lerche (rlerche)
<rlerche(at)cisco(dot)com> wrote:
> Hi. Has anyone had experience building PostgreSQL to support Address Space
> Layout Randomization (ASLR)? I recently took a brute-force approach
> (compiling everything with -fPIC and specifying -pie on all executables).
> This worked, but a (very superficial) performance test indicated a high cost
> (around 50%, much more than I expected). This was on 64-bit Linux x86.
>
> Google turns up some references to the Ubuntu distribution of version 8.3
> being built this way but nothing much more interesting.
>
> I’d appreciate any information or help anyone can give me on this. Thanks.

AFAIK you've got it backwards: ASLR is something that happens
automatically, unless you take steps to suppress it, at least on MacOS
X. I not long ago built with EXEC_BACKEND on that platform and found
that it broke stuff until I disabled ASLR.

--
Robert Haas
EnterpriseDB: http://www.enterprisedb.com
The Enterprise PostgreSQL Company