[parisc-linux] Job for someone

[Carlos O'Donell]

On Tue, Feb 17, 2004 at 04:03:20PM +0100, Christoph Hellwig wrote:
> On Tue, Feb 17, 2004 at 02:42:06PM +0000, Matthew Wilcox wrote:
> > I was contacted by one of the Debian XFree86 people yesterday asking if
> > someone would like to look at the XFree86 loader for parisc so they could
> > rearrange the packaging to ship the modules separately from the server.
> > I don't have any great desire to work on a dynamic linker, but I bet
> > somebody else does ... ;-)
> 
> Maybe that someone should fix the issue right and switch XFree to use
> dlopen() for Linux.  If some other OSes want to keep the current junk
> it'll be their problem to fix it..

I spent time reviewing the loader code in XFree86 and the loader code in
glibc (when I fixed our relocation processing for COPY relocs).

So here are my two cents:

o As I understand it, the startup sequence of XFree86 is precarious, and
  loading the module via dlopen doesn't work because the symbol
  resolution order cannot follow the ELF standard 100%. It has to be done
  slightly out of order to bootstrap the server. This seems silly and
  should probably be fixed, but would require testing across all
  platforms. I figure it hasn't been done for that particular reason.

o It's not a horrible job to add our relocations to the XFree86 code,
  and I could probably do it given a couple of weeks. I almost started
  the job a year ago but lost steam when I blew the video out of my
  712/60.

So I'll set out the following challenge, if someone ships me a video
card for my c3k I'll fix the XFree86 loader. Short of that I imagine
that a 712/60 mobo with a working onboard video would be just as good :)

c.