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Wireshark-dev: Re: [Wireshark-dev] Compile with PIE

From: Bill Meier <wmeier@xxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Tue, 05 Jan 2010 11:41:20 -0500
Stig Bj�rlykke wrote:
Hi,

Can we build Wireshark and friends as Position-independent executables (PIE)?
The attached patch seems to do this.  Any objections against this patch?





I've no experience with Position-independent executables; A quick search does suggest that there's a performance hit (every time the program is loaded into memory ??).


For example:

From: http://www.redhat.com/magazine/009jul05/features/execshield/

  "Position independent code has a performance overhead on most
   architectures (x86-64 is the exception to this). For this reason,
   neither Red Hat� Enterprise Linux� nor Fedora� Core have the entire
   distribution compiled as a PIE binary. Only selected, security
   sensitive programs are compiled as PIEs. "

Thoughts ??