[Info-vax] A day i life of the image activator.

[hb@end.of.inter.net]

On Monday, April 3, 2023 at 4:07:03 PM UTC+2, John Reagan wrote:
> > > 
> > > A Day in the Life of the Image Activator 
> > > 
> > > as recounted to Stanley Rabinowitz on 7-Jan-1985
> And since the VAX days, the image activator is even busier with filling in tons of relocations into the Itanium "short" 
> section, sharable image symbol-vectors, as well as the references to all the shareable images. 
> 
> For "fun", I did a ANAL/IMAGE/SEGMENT=DYNAMIC on an XMACRO cross-compiler in my directory. There are 57237 
> image relocations just for XMACRO alone. 
> ...
And they are applied either once or never. XMACRO is a main program. The  ELF linker by default generates image relocations, even for main image. Just in case they need to be relocated. Main images usually are  not relocated, except they are installed /RESIDENT. And that happens usually only once at system startup.

Shareable images are always relocated, except you run them as main images.