The Underlying System

When an application is built using a shared object, the entire loadable contents of the object are mapped into the virtual address space of that process at runtime. Each process that uses a shared object starts by referencing a single copy of the shared object in memory.

Relocations within the shared object are processed to bind symbolic references to their appropriate definitions. This results in the calculation of true virtual addresses which could not be derived at the time the shared object was generated by the link-editor. These relocations usually result in updates to entries within the process's data segment(s).

The memory management scheme underlying the dynamic linking of shared objects shares memory among processes at the granularity of a page. Memory pages can be shared as long as they are not modified at runtime. If a process writes to a page of a shared object when writing a data item, or relocating a reference to a shared object, it generates a private copy of that page. This private copy will have no effect on other users of the shared object, however, this page will have lost any benefit of sharing between other processes. Text pages that become modified in this manner are referred to as impure.

The segments of a shared object that are mapped into memory fall into two basic categories; the text segment, which is read-only, and the data segment, which is read-write (see "Useful Tools" on how to obtain this information from an ELF file). An overriding goal when developing a shared object is to maximize the text segment and minimize the data segment. This optimizes the amount of code sharing while reducing the amount of processing needed to initialize and use a shared object. The following sections present mechanisms that can help achieve this goal.