> There was an article by Jakub explaining this. I can not seem to find it > right now.
Found! :) The first one: http://lwn.net/Articles/190495/ Why PIE should not be prelinked and in general about the main purpose of PIE. > btw, why cannot non-pic libs be prelinked? works for non-pie executables, > after all. Well, by definition, non-pic libraries cannot be prelinked since the symbols are at fixed addresses. You can not change the symbols using prelink. It is mentioned in the prelink manual [1], and prelink goes out of its way to find non-pic libraries and ignore them. You can just read the preface where it says why the libraries should be PIC, and how only PIC libraries can actually be prelinked. Oh, and one point. I am not familiar with systemd, but AFAIK too bloated as it is. It has a lot of code in it that should not be in the startup program, for instance: it has code to plymouth in it. That is a bit funny, but it might be just that I am lacking something... :) Best Regards, Laszlo Papp [1] http://docs.google.com/viewer?url=http%3A%2F%2Fpeople.redhat.com%2Fjakub%2Fprelink.pdf