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

[Paolo Bonzini]

On Tue, May 23, 2023 at 10:18 AM Daniel P. Berrangé <berrange@redhat.com> wrote:
> > The issue is that Meson only has "enable PIE" or "leave PIE to the
> > compiler default", while QEMU also has "disable PIE"---which is the
> > messy one.
>
> Does QEMU actually need "disable PIE" ? It existed in configure of
> course, is there a reason we need to continue to support it in meson ?

We have "disable PIE" support because PIE has a performance cost,
though that's mostly for 32-bit x86 processors. Other ISAs have
instructions that help (like x86-64's RIP-relative addressing,
aarch64's adr/adrp, or RISC-V's auipc) and then position-independent
code becomes the natural one anyway.

However, I am inclined to keep it also because "--disable-pie uses the
compiler default, and who knows what your distro did" is less obvious
than "--disable-pie disables PIE".

Paolo