Reply To: Shared position-independent code

Handling of local references from within dynamically loaded libraries has hardware support, NYF. Handling of inter-library references (the app is just another library) depends on whether hot-swap capability is requested by the ELF file. Hot-swap uses a PLT and GOT for such references, so that the indirection can be changed at run-time. Non-hot-swap uses quasi-static linking at load-time, but no code modification at run-time. Hot-swap code can reference non-hot-swap and vice versa transparently. We expect that the default will be that any explicit use of dlopen will use hot-swap, while dependent libraries (both dependents of the app and dependents of dlopen’d libraries) will be non-hot-swap by default.