kdeinit (was: Summary from Buildsystem BoF at Desktop Summit)

[Thiago Macieira]

On Tuesday, 16 de August de 2011 11:50:25 Oswald Buddenhagen wrote:
> On Tue, Aug 16, 2011 at 10:59:18AM +0200, Thiago Macieira wrote:
> > In my opinion, kdeinit should stay.
> 
> try to convince lennart of that. when i suggested to add kdeinit-like
> functionality to systemd his response was "no way". and if we ignore
> systemd, we'll lose in the longer run.

We'll ignore it as long as it doesn't work with our software. Since 
distributions need to distribute KDE, they will either keep away from systemd 
or they will adapt it to us.

> the selinux guys and some others hate us for kdeinit anyway.

They hate the whole architecture of doing I/O out-of-process.

> regarding nvidia, they know about the issue and have been enlightened
> about its severity? btw, why cannot non-pic libs be prelinked? works
> for non-pie executables, after all.

They have. They won't change.

I checked with Chris Lee when I last had the kdeinit-vs-prelink discussion 
with Lennart. While Chris couldn't reveal any internals from NVidia on the 
reasons why PIC is used, he did confirm that the issue was known.

My guess is that NVidia either wants the extra register that PIC reserves for 
performance reasons or they have hand-written assembly that uses it. Or both.

When presented with this argument, Lennart simply said he doesn't use broken 
software. In other words, he doesn't care that people use the NVidia 
libraries.

As for why prelink can't prelink non-PIC libs, I am not sure. It might be that 
the relocations present in the text segment are not suitable for prelinking 
(prelinkable relocations require an extra argument, the "addend").

> > Another advantage of kdeinit is to run the static constructors in
> > libraries, [...]
> 
> good luck with that... :}

10 years of it working not good for you?

-- 
Thiago Macieira - thiago (AT) macieira.info - thiago (AT) kde.org
   Software Architect - Intel Open Source Technology Center
      PGP/GPG: 0x6EF45358; fingerprint:
      E067 918B B660 DBD1 105C  966C 33F5 F005 6EF4 5358
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