>Well, quite. Perhaps I'm missing something here, but I don't see what >the use of a non-position-independent shared object is;
Not a lot. If you want to use a shared object purely as a way of dynamically loading code, and don't actually want to share it, it can be slightly more efficient to build it non PIC. But the vast majority of cases of non-PIC code in shared objects happen by mistake, either because they want to include code from some other library (-liberty, say) that isn't built PIC, or because they just plain forget to use -fPIC. p.
