> Whoa. I hadn't realized that they had done this stuff in assembly.
> I realize that the stuff in the kernel probably needs to have some
> assembly, but they really shouldn't have needed to go to assembly for
> the stuff in the user-level libraries/binaries. If what you say is
> true, it is very unfortunate because it means even those with a source
> license will find it hard to build shared libraries.
The only stuff done in assembly is the LWP (Light Weight Process)
code. And the only part of that is the code to actually save and
restore process contexts. It's not much code, I believe that it is
only used by server processes, not client code. Besides, you can
easily write possition-independent assembly code. I'd have to go look
again, but I'm fairly sure that the lwp assembly code is PIC -- it
always references symbols to things outside the file, not addresses.
It should be possible to make shared AFS libraries out of it.
-derek
