[OE-core] What do these warnings mean?

[Richard Purdie]

On Thu, 2013-02-14 at 05:35 -0700, Gary Thomas wrote:
> I imported libav from meta-oe into my build so I can have additional
> gstreamer support.  Now I'm seeing these warnings:
> 
> WARNING: QA Issue: ELF binary 
> '/home/local/p82_soft/tmp/work/cortexa9-vfp-neon-amltd-linux-gnueabi/gst-plugins-bad/0.10.23-r3.ti1.6.4.3/packages-split/gst-plugins-bad-vp8/usr/lib/gstreamer-0.10/libgstvp8.so' 
> has relocations in .text
> WARNING: QA Issue: ELF binary '/home/local/p82_soft/tmp/work/cortexa9-vfp-neon-amltd-linux-gnueabi/libav/0.8.3-r0/packages-split/libavcodec/usr/lib/libavcodec.so.53.35.0' has 
> relocations in .text
> 
> Exactly what do these mean?  What do I do to get rid of them?

It means the linker has to perform relocations on the .text segment at
runtime. This slows down loads and means more memory usage if two
applications use the library since the kernel can't share the mappings.
It will work its just inefficient.

The fix us usually to compile as position independent code using the pic
compiler option.

Cheers,

Richard (far from an expert on this)