You may write your own linker script so that all rdata section will be put to .data when emacs.exe is linked, but again, it doesn't look as the proper way to deal with the problem.
According to objdump, there is no "readonly" flag set for .rdata.
Does Windows know about the name .rdata and know that only one copy is needed for multiple emacs processes? Or perhaps Cygwin knows about the name for similar reasons?
Or perhaps (gasp) the implementation is not currently complete and .rdata buys me nothing at present?
Thanks for the feedback -- I am looking for something easy to do here to get the existing 21.2 emacs back in shape for Cygwin. I already need to rewrite unexec() for the FSF version for copyright reasons and don't really want to spend any time on the current unexec() code -- it's throwaway at some point. -- Joe Buehler