On 28 Feb 2011 at 15:39, Daniel Reidy wrote: > On Sun, Feb 27, 2011 at 5:58 PM, <pagee...@freemail.hu> wrote: > > that's actually not the intended use of the PIC USE flag, we wanted it > > originally > > to enable configuring/compiling position independent code for packages > > where one > > wanted to make a tradeoff between speed/security (i think php was one such > > app, > > even without any hand written asm code). > > > > so with USE=pic you were supposed to get a textrel free, but potentially > > slower > > binary (partly because of the PIC overhead on i386 and partly because > > sometimes > > it meant using the C implementation of some algo instead of hand written > > asm). > > So if I understand this correctly, we should now be turning off PIC on > Gentoo-Hardened systems running on AMD64. What about the non-hardened > variety, such as my desktop, that is only running a "stock" version of > Gentoo Sources without hardened features?
USE=pic should have exactly 0 effect on amd64 because the arch and the ELF ABI makes PIC zero cost basically. if some package manages to get around the rules somehow, it's a bug in that package, treat it accordingly ;).
