Truthfully though you're right, using typical linkers, this would be pretty slow; at least a few seconds for large binaries, to minutes for things as large as web browsers. However, for many binaries, linking can be done much faster; mold claims to be only 50% the runtime of using `cp` on the object files, which is fast enough to even re-link Firefox on-the-fly without it being unusable.
You could imagine writing a linker specifically for this case, that encodes information about the object files directly into the resulting bundle.
OpenBSD relinks sshd. Which is relatively small thing that is linked from relatively large objects (ie. it is the typical modern C code). Relinking thing like glibc on demand is going to be problematic, because it is structured as to allow small binary sizes for static linking and thus almost every function that is part of glibc API is a separate compilation unit and object file. Linking that into .so is slow, no mater what kind of optimalization tricks you implement in the linker.
Yes, but this thread is about doing the linking after boot. It doesn't matter if you link synchronously before you start the program or link asynchronously after you start the program - you will still get a new unique binary for each boot.
Yeah. That said, I'm suggesting that if it was really too slow, though, it'd probably be infeasible to relink libc, the kernel, etc. at bootup. It's not a direct comparison to be sure.
Truthfully though you're right, using typical linkers, this would be pretty slow; at least a few seconds for large binaries, to minutes for things as large as web browsers. However, for many binaries, linking can be done much faster; mold claims to be only 50% the runtime of using `cp` on the object files, which is fast enough to even re-link Firefox on-the-fly without it being unusable.
You could imagine writing a linker specifically for this case, that encodes information about the object files directly into the resulting bundle.