Re: Removal of unexec support from glibc malloc

[Fabrice Popineau]

Eli Zaretskii <eliz <at> gnu.org> writes:

> 
> > From: Ali Bahrami <ali_gnu2 <at> emvision.com>
> > Date: Mon, 18 Jan 2016 15:45:50 -0700
> > 

> > Unexec is complicated, and it is a problem for alternative non-brk
> > based mallocs, or ASLR. One of the strong design points of emacs is
> > its use of a minimal and simple C core, with the system largely 
written
> > in lisp. Losing unexec would leave an even simpler core.
> 
> We are not wedded to unexec in any kind, including the Catholic kind.
> It is here because (a) it "just works" and breaks only very rarely,
> and, most importantly, (b) no one has stepped forward with code to
> replace it on a VCS branch where one could checkout the results and
> see how clean the code is how well it works in practice.
> 

A portable dumper would solve the unexec issue.

There was an attempt at porting the XEmacs portable dumper to GNU Emacs 
long ago:
http://www.sodan.org/~knagano/emacs/pdump/

The topic is recurrent:
https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-gnu-emacs/2015-06/msg00771.html
https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-gnu-emacs/2015-06/msg00781.html

Fabrice