Hi Alex, RP, Mark,

I did some research on the subject in order to try to figure out what is going on.

1) I come to a similar conclusion with what found, but tried to look a bit deeper for the reason.

1.1) The reason that cross-prelink is not prelinking is, that for a quite some time by default everything is built with PIE mode by default and cross-prelink does not seem to be able to work on exe/libs compiled with PIE mode. So seeing the same behavior with and without prelinking is what I would expect as long as everything is compiled with PIE mode.

A more detailed analysis of my tests can be found on my not yet officially published site:

https://rlbl.me/prelink-1

https://rlbl.me/prelink-2

Alex:

Can you please rebuild your test images without PIE mode and re-run the tests?

Then we should have the 4 test cases:

prelinked-with-pie
no-prelink-with-pie
prelink-no-pie
no-prelink-no-pie

I guess then we can discuss what are the next steps.

In my opinion the current default settings, which compile close to everything in PIE mode, but invoke also cross-prelink do not make much sense.

The question is: "Do we want to drop cross-prelink, or do we want to drag it along and come up more fine-grained configuration options?"

We could e.g. exclude certain files from pre-linking.

IMHO cross-prelink still works, but not on exe/libs which were compiled in PIE mode.

Regards,

Robert