This article’s aim is to explain how a modern operating system makes it possible to use shared libraries with load-time relocation. It focuses on the Linux OS running on 32-bit x86, but the general principles apply to other OSes and CPUs as well.

Each code module in your shared library should define the GOT as an external symbol:

extern _GLOBAL_OFFSETTABLE ; in ELF
extern __GLOBAL_OFFSETTABLE ; in BSD a.out

At the beginning of any function in your shared library which plans to access your data or BSS sections, you must first calculate the address of the GOT. This is typically done by writing the function in this form:

func: push ebp
mov ebp,esp
push ebx
call .get_GOT
.get_GOT:
pop ebx
add ebx,_GLOBAL_OFFSETTABLE+$$-.get_GOT wrt ..gotpc

    ; the function body comes here 

    mov     ebx,[ebp-4] 
    mov     esp,ebp 
    pop     ebp 
    ret

This article is an attempt to sum up a small number of generic rules that appear to be useful rules of thumb when creating high performing programs. It is structured by first establishing some fundamental causes of performance hits followed by their extensions.

One of the best (but little known) features of GNU C is the attribute mechanism, which allows a developer to attach characteristics to function declarations to allow the compiler to perform more error checking. It was designed in a way to be compatible with non-GNU implementations, and we've been using this for years in highly portable code with very good results.

Web server in go

How to use lib lua

Leszek Godlewski, the former developer at The Farm 51 who has ported games like Painkiller Hell and Damnation and Deadfall Adventures to Linux / SteamOS, has given another presentation on porting games to Linux.

It doesn't make any sense to talk about lock free data structures without covering such topics as atomic operations, memory model in programming languages, safe memory reclamation, compiler and optimizations used by them, modern CPU designs, — all of these topics will be covered more or less in this series.

On i386, because of the dearth of general-purpose registers, the calling convention passes all arguments on the stack. This makes the vaarg implementation easy – A valistis simply a pointer into the stack, andvaargjust adds the size of the type to be retrieved to thevalist, and returns the old value. In fact, the i386 ABI reference simply specifiesva_arg in terms of a single line of code:

On amd64, the problem is much more complicated. To start, amd64 specifies that up to 6 integer arguments and up to 8 floating-point arguments are passed to functions in registers, to take advantage of amd64's larger number of registers. So, for a start, va_arg will have to deal with the fact that some arguments may have been passed in registers, and some on the stack.