Re: [PATCH] meson: remove -no-pie linker flag

[Richard Henderson]

On 5/22/23 01:08, Paolo Bonzini wrote:
> The large comment in the patch says it all; the -no-pie flag is broken and
> this is why it was not included in QEMU_LDFLAGS before commit a988b4c5614
> ("build: move remaining compiler flag tests to meson", 2023-05-18).

It's not nearly as simple as that.

> +  # What about linker flags?  For a static build, no PIE is implied by -static
> +  # which we added above.  For dynamic linking, adding -no-pie is messy because
> +  # it overrides -shared: the linker then wants to build an executable instead
> +  # of a shared library and the build fails.  Before moving this code to Meson,
> +  # we went through a dozen different commits affecting the usage of -no-pie,
> +  # ultimately settling for a completely broken one that added -no-pie to the
> +  # compiler flags together with -fno-pie... except that -no-pie is a linker
> +  # flag that has no effect on the compiler command line.

-no-pie is a linker flag, but distro folk that didn't quite know what they were doing made 
local changes to gcc's specs file.  So it *is* a compiler command-line flag, but only for 
some builds of gcc.

We can't just remove -no-pie, we need to probe for it as cc.get_supported_arguments 
instead of cc.get_supported_link_arguments.

Or something.  It's a mess, for sure.


r~