Re: how to turn off PIE on Fedora?

[Geoff Keating <geoffk at geoffk dot org>]

Per Bothner <per@bothner.com> writes:

> Can any Red Hat engineers shed light on this:
> 
> Data seems to move around unpredictably under Fedora Core.
> I.e. I run cc1 under gdb to a breakpoint or error, and note
> the memory address of some variable.  I then re-run cc1 with
> no changes, and the variable has jumped to a different address.
> This complicates debugging, and specifically setting conditional
> breakpoints.
> 
> This presumably is because of PIE "position independent
> executables", which is supoosed to increase security.  Fine -
> but how can I turn it off for development builds?
> 
> PIE also breaks PCH, and hence running the gcc testsuite.

The PCH problem has come up before, I responded to it in
<http://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc/2003-11/msg00242.html>.  I didn't realise
this would apply to the GCC executable, too; for that, I suggest
adding -fno-pie to CFLAGS.  (I don't believe PCH requires any library
function addresses to stay constant, so long as they don't move into
address space that PCH needs.)

-- 
- Geoffrey Keating <geoffk@geoffk.org>