Re: `exec shield' test in configure too strict?

[Richard Stallman]

    Doesn't this harm cross-building Emacs?  I always thought that running
    a test program at configure time should be avoided, and that tests
    that only compile or link programs should be peferred.

Yes, that is true.  But maybe there is no way to test this
based on the compilation environment.

    When cross compiling the test obviously can not be run, so configure 
    assumes
    that the heap start address is not random.  Come to think of it, the old
    test (checking /proc/sys/kernel/exec-shield) was worse, as it did not 
    handle
    cross compiling.

That will be right most of the time today, but that may not be
true in the future.

Can we modify unexec to handle this case correctly?  What exactly is
it that we now do in the case where we see that exec shield is
enabled?  How does that avoid the problem?