Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!swrinde!elroy.jpl.nasa.gov!decwrl!ogicse!milton!uw-beaver!stowe.cs.washington.edu!pauld From: pauld@stowe.cs.washington.edu (Paul Barton-Davis) Newsgroups: comp.unix.internals Subject: Re: Shared Lib Question (ISC) Message-ID: <1991May17.021022.14272@beaver.cs.washington.edu> Date: 17 May 91 02:10:22 GMT References: <1991May15.043318.7046@mp.cs.niu.edu> <194@titccy.cc.titech.ac.jp> Sender: news@beaver.cs.washington.edu (USENET News System) Organization: Computer Science & Engineering, U. of Washington, Seattle Lines: 32 In article rang@cs.wisc.edu (Anton Rang) writes: > I don't know of any operating systems which support multiple >processes which use the load-time fixup approach. Certain micro >systems (e.g. the Apple //gs) do this, but the cost on a multi-user >machine of not being able to share pages (and of paging everything in >as you do the load-time fixup) is high. > Anton, I'm not quite sure what you mean by a load-time fixup appraoch, but if it describes resolving the references to library symbols at load time, then just check out OSF/1 :-) Just got back from a 1 day seminar on OSF/1, and this behaviour provoked some interesting questions from several people. Apparently, some systems use another level of indirection to solve the problem of globals during load-time resolution ("look at 0xXXXXXX to find out where errno lives" type of thing). No-one at the seminar knew what OSF/1 does, but it was claimed that Mach's lazy evaluation approach to VM made whatever it does do much easier :-) [ BTW - from the impression I received, I intend to stay as far away from OSF/1 as possible. Maybe OSF/2, if its a proper microkernel-based implementation of Mach, will be more satisfactory. However, my impressions may, of course, be wrong ] -- Paul Barton-Davis UW Computer Science Lab "People cannot cooperate towards common goals if they are forced to compete with each other in order to guarantee their own survival."