>Now, why should this not happen? Will the performance penalty be too great? >Would it be easier to patch glibc-2.1 with Phil's changes to 2.2? Is there The libc patch is certainly pretty straightforward. I think this would be a better solution than making -fPIC the default because it only penalises the few programs that don't use PIC when they should, rather than the many that don't need to use PIC at all. p.