Why is GNU/Linux so Bloated?

[Tzafrir Cohen]

On Fri, Jun 12, 2009 at 10:21:56AM +0300, Oleg Goldshmidt wrote:
> Shachar Shemesh <shachar at shemesh.biz> writes:
> 
> > I'm not sure whether base addresses are allocated randomly or
> > something else is at work here, but collisions are not that common.
> 
> You can manually rebase a DLL at post-link time, 

On Linux you use the package 'prelink'

> and I think that DLLs
> shipped by commercial vendors (such as MS :) have precomputed base
> addresses to avoid the overhead of load-time relocations. If many of
> the DLLs in your experience came from 3rd parties then this may
> explain your observation.
> 
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portable_Executable#Relocations
> http://www.ddj.com/184416272

If you care about that, install prelink. IIRC distributions tend to
configure it to run a weekly cron job to prelink all binaries on the
system.

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