Compiling libjvm.so as PIC

[Omair Majid]

Hi all,

Ionana and I have been trying to get icedtea to work when built as a 
normal user with SELinux enabled. SELinux stops java from loading 
libjvm.so which is built as non-PIC. Please see 
http://bugs.sun.com/bugdatabase/view_bug.do?bug_id=6538311 for more 
information.

The bug report states that building libjvm.so as PIC has performance 
penalties. Ioana and I have been comparing the performance of a JVM 
built as PIC with one built as non-PIC for the last few days. For the 
JVM built as PIC, the fastest run was about 3% faster than the slowest. 
For the JVM built as non-PIC, the fastest run was about 1% faster than 
the slowest. Comparing the average performance, the PIC JVM seems to be 
faster by 0.59% which indicates that any difference in performance is 
negligible.

Building libjmv.so as PIC should also result in memory savings as the 
code segment will be shared across processes.

The attached patch will build libjvm.so as PIC. Any objections to 
applying it?

Thanks,
Omair

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