I noticed this in the strace output of prelink .. access("/proc/sys/kernel/exec-shield", F_OK) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory) This file no longer exists. If it wants to know the va space layout, it should be checking /proc/sys/kernel/randomize_va_space
Well, address space randomization isn't what prelink is interested in, what it wants to check for is whether the specific behavior exec-shield patches had is being used. In particular, the ASCII armor part, of preferring to randomize shared libraries at addresses with topmost 8 bits being 0 (or bits 16-23 being 0). If that file was present, prelink would put most oftenly used shared libraries randomized somewhere into that ASCII armor area, and only those that wouldn't fit there somewhere else.
ahh. it looks like we only did that for 32bit processes. We're still carrying that patch to do that (minus the sysctl), but I'd really like to just drop it at some point, as it doesn't seem to have had any traction at getting upstream, and Ingo seems to have lost interest in maintaining it a long time ago.
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