On Tue, 17 Apr 2012 08:49:21 +1000 Allan McRae wrote:
Slightly on 32bit and almost no difference on 64bit. OpenBSD uses PIEs everywhere and my x86 users say everythings much quicker than Windows.
Care to define "slightly"... I looked into this when we added some hardening to our default CFLAGS and the benchmarks I found indicated that adding PIE to 32bit added a 5-10% performance hit.
That's the figure that's in all the forums. Does that happen for all programs, I'm under the impression not but could be very wrong? Would you actually notice the 5-10%? As I say, I didn't notice on OpenBSD and there would be a larger slow down for programs that had to run dbus before they ran the first time as I didn't start it during boot. I'd be more concerned about having to deal with fallout myself which I believe would apply to 64 bit too? I see the security as more important especially as any speed sensitive app user could recompile that one app. If you've already looked into it and decided then, cool. It looks like ubuntu are selectively enabling/disabling it and looking into it more at the moment.