I'd like to get the NDK rebuilt with -fPIC so we can remove most of the text relocations in the libraries we build on Android. Text relocations slow down startup and increase memory usage. I basically did this to get it building with -fPIC: --- a/build/tools/patches/005-flags.patch +++ b/build/tools/patches/005-flags.patch @@ -6,8 +6,8 @@ index 670b620..06c95e9 100644 LDFLAGS_FOR_TARGET=-mandroid CFLAGS_FOR_TARGET+= -DANDROID -D__ANDROID__ -+CFLAGS_FOR_TARGET+= -fexceptions -+CXXFLAGS_FOR_TARGET+= -frtti ++CFLAGS_FOR_TARGET+= -fexceptions -fPIC ++CXXFLAGS_FOR_TARGET+= -frtti -fPIC # Helper prefix-list = $(foreach e, $(2), $(join $1, $e)) I followed the latest instructions on the crystax site to build it. (which are a little different now.. the source pulling part pulls code from a specific date now)

From bug 646843: Mike Hommey [:glandium]: Currently libgcc.a and libstdc++.a are not built as PIC. From my experiments, this should get us between 2 and 5% less time spent before main(), provided bug 646815 is fixed as well.

Bear - What's the status here?

(In reply to comment #3) > Bear - What's the status here? it's on my task list. right now i'm buildduty and will get back to it after buildduty.

Bear is working on deploying the r5 NDK via puppet right now (Bug 657723). Once that's done, we'll revisit this bug and re-compile r5 with -fPIC.

From bug 646843: From my experiments, all that is needed is to add --with-pic as a compile option to gcc (which I did through build/tools/build-gcc.sh), and add -fPIC to libgcc config options (which I did through the TARGET_LIBGCC2_CFLAGS variable in src/gcc/gcc-4.4.0/gcc/config/arm/t-arm-softfp, though there's probably a better place)

edited bug title to be very clear that we will be compiling only the r5 NDK with -fPIC support

glandium noted in IRC that PIC support may already be in NDK5.

yep, good catch - according to http://groups.google.com/group/android-ndk/browse_thread/thread/9fd148aa92a6fab6 PIC is available and enabled by default with NDK5