Why the GTK+ wayland backend can't be enabled in linux distros, at all

[Pierre-Loup A. Griffais]

Hi Thiago,

Thanks for your interest in the NVIDIA driver; please allow me to try to clarify 
the situation. You're right that we're not building with -fPIC for performance 
reasons, but that only applies to the x86 platform. No text relocations should 
be present in our x86_64 libraries thanks to PIC being free on that platform.

Our driver also has a number of relative relocations in the data sections, where 
our dispatch tables are. This is a side-effect of supporting a lot of 
functionality combined with a number of different hardware architectures; this 
applies to both x86 and x86_64 architectures.

The former currently incurs a penalty of about 18M of private memory, while the 
latter is ~4M on x86 and ~6M on x86_64.

There exists a utility called 'prelink' that can be used to pro-actively 
relocate shared objects on the system (or a single shared object to an arbitrary 
base address), removing the need for the loader to apply relocations if used 
properly. Prelinking libnvidia-glcore at a fixed, free address allows memory 
that would otherwise by dirtied by the loader when relocating to remain shared 
cleanly between processes.

However, the linux ELF loader currently has a bug that causes the second type of 
relocation to be overwritten even if prelink had already initialized them to the 
correct value. This causes the memory in the relocation sections to get dirtied 
without anything being changed, which contradicts our goal.

Attached is a proof-of-concept patch which fixes this issue for the x86_64 Linux 
ELF loader. By both applying this patch to the loader and prelinking 
libnvidia-glcore.so, distros can reduce the memory overhead of linking an 
application against the NVIDIA libGL to just a few kB:

7fc001b2a000-7fc002309000 rwxp 0192a000 08:01 1591924 
/usr/lib/libnvidia-glcore.so.295.33
Size:               8060 kB
Rss:                6592 kB
Pss:                6592 kB
Shared_Clean:          0 kB
Shared_Dirty:          0 kB
Private_Clean:      6544 kB
Private_Dirty:        48 kB
Referenced:         6592 kB
Anonymous:            48 kB
AnonHugePages:         0 kB
Swap:                  0 kB
KernelPageSize:        4 kB
MMUPageSize:           4 kB
Locked:                0 kB

Thanks,
   - Pierre-Loup

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