[x264-devel] DT_TEXTRELs on x86_32

[atoth at atoth.sote.hu]

Dear x264 Developers,

Let me express my respect towards all of you working on this project.
Putting time and energy developing a handy piece of software.

Last weekend I was about to upgrade two systems running Hardened Gentoo
and faced with the fact that x264 introduced some TEXTRELs in its shared
library.
Since I use a system which discourages TEXTRELs, I tried to investigate
this regression. After noting the sites of TEXTRELs and the object dump of
the library it was strange to see, that some asm routines without any
changes have TEXTRELs. It was good to see, that the asm source is
essentially PIC-aware. That requires knowledge and skill for a developer
to refine PIC asm code. It was suspicious, that something conceptually
happened to the sources. The snapshot from August was free of TEXTRELs, so
I took a look at on the differences between the October snapshot and that
one.
I was shocked upon coming across of this:
"
-; - picgetgot computes the GOT address into the given register in PIC
-;   mode, otherwise does nothing. You need to do this before using GLOBAL.
-;   Before in both execution order and compiled code order (so GLOBAL knows
-;   which register the GOT is in).
+; x86_32 doesn't require PIC.
+; Some distros prefer shared objects to be PIC, but nothing breaks if
+; the code contains a few textrels, so we'll skip that complexity.
"

Now I think I probably did something terribly wrong, if this should be my
Xmas present.

I agree, that some TEXTRELs in an executable won't stop x86_32 running.
But there are some users who still care about TEXTRELs and would choose
that discouraged complexity even on x86_32 instead of simplicity.

I'd like to kindly ask you to restore the old behavior on x86_32 or at
least provide a way to activate the old macros upon need using an option
or something. Please take into consideration my humble opinion, and don't
treat it like whining of an unskilled user. I think most users don't know
anything about TEXTRELs. However there are some idiots, like me who care.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to all devs of x264 reading this.
Please keep on developing this handy library.

Dwokfur
-- 
dr Tóth Attila, Radiológus, 06-20-825-8057, 06-30-5962-962
Attila Toth MD, Radiologist, +36-20-825-8057, +36-30-5962-962