'ld' advice for RH6.2 to RH7.2 migration

'ld' advice for RH6.2 to RH7.2 migration

[Hudson, Thomas]

Hi all, 
	We're currently having problems with the version ld shipped with RH6.2 (2.9.5). These range from segfaults to "memory exhausted" errors. Our builds are huge, with link times on the order of 20 minutes on a top-end desktop machine with 2 gigs of ram. We currently are in the process of migration to RH7.2, but factors beyond our control require that we build on 6.2 (glibc21) and deploy on 7.2 (glibc22) in compatibility mode.

We have tried using a later version of binutils (2.13.2), and everything looked good until we noticed that many applications were suddenly unable to catch exceptions. It seems to happen mostly in apps that use dlopen. It is highly possible that these dlopen apps are composed of pieces built with the old linker and pieces built with the new. 

In investigating this, I have found that the RH7.2 version of 'ld' (2.11.90.8) has several supported emulations, most notably "elf_i386_glibc21". Any version of binutils I grab doesn't seem to have this emulation, though I have seen several patches floating around that seem related to this. I had hoped to build a newer version of binutils for 6.2 that could be deployed on 7.2 without problems, but it seems I need this emulation to get it to work correctly. 

Any ideas or suggestions?

Thanks,
Tomy