Bug#528080: ffmpeg-debian: ffmpeg still has shlib-with-non-pic-code lintian errors

[Andreas Cadhalpun]

Hi Niels,

On 16.10.2016 08:45, Niels Thykier wrote:
> Do you know if upstream has re-evaluated this choice after gcc-5 fixed
> one of the major performance issues with PIC on i386?
> 
> Source:
> https://software.intel.com/en-us/blogs/2014/12/26/new-optimizations-for-x86-in-upcoming-gcc-50-32bit-pic-mode

That's great! Thanks for sharing this information.

However, in the case of ffmpeg the really performance critical part is
optimized in hand-written assembler code, which for i386 contains text
relocations.
So the ffmpeg libraries will contain text relocations on i386 even when
built with -fPIE/-fPIC (which will be the case in the next release, since
pie was enabled upstream).

By the way, do you happen to know what problems these text relocations
cause from a security point of view?
(I thought they were incompatible with NX, but that seems not to be
the case [1].)

Best regards,
Andreas


1: https://ffmpeg.org/pipermail/ffmpeg-devel/2016-October/201103.html