ELF Binary Stripper?

[John Wendel]

Rahul Sundaram wrote:
> Peter Gordon wrote:
> 
>> Mike McCarty said:
>>  
>>
>>> One *known* effect (not a side effect) is that the binary you execute is
>>> not the binary which went through QA.
>>>   
>>
>>
>> So that brings up a good point to me: Why doesn't Red Hat just distribute
>> already-prelinked binaries? Would it be overly difficult to get their 
>> build
>> system to do this?
> 
> That would only be useful if the software in the system is static.  As 
> long as the software is updated, prelinking is a process that needs to 
> be run regularly inorder for the system to get any benefits out of it.
> 
> regards
> Rahul
> 


Well, this discussion made me curious, so I decided to run prelink.

I've got an FC3 "everything install, latest updates" system that has 
never had prelink run on it, unless it was run by the installer, since 
I don't run cron. The hardware is a 933 Mhz PIII, 512MB, Intel MB, 
80GB Maxtor IDE disk.

As root, I ran "time prelink -av > foo".

Wallclock was 2 minutes 16 seconds, CPU was 14 seconds. The system was 
responsive on another console while prelink was running.

The output file contained one line,
"Laying out 758 libraries in virtual address space 41000000-50000000".

There was some console output complaining about Firefox and Mozilla 
and unable to locate dependent somethings.

I'd say if prelink eats your system for a long period, you need file a 
Bugzilla. I'm sure the developer would appreciate it :)

Regards,

John