High Performance Dynamic Linking Through Caching

The Spring Operating System provides high performance dynamic linking of program images. Spring uses caching of both fixed-up program images and partially fixed-up shared libraries to make dynamic linking of program images efficient, to reduce the need for PIC (position-independent code), and to improve page sharing between different program images running the same libraries. The result is that with program image caching, dynamically-linked programs have a start-up cost similar to statically-linked programs regardless of the number of unresolved symbols in dynamically-linked program images and shared libraries. In addition, with library and program image caching, we have reduced the need for PIC and have increased page sharing.