Re: Vendor adoption of PIE INFO#934476 oss-security

[Nick Kralevich <nnk () google com>]

On Sun, Feb 16, 2014 at 6:28 AM, Stuart Henderson <stu () spacehopper org> wrote:
> Everything else, base system and ports, is built with PIE.
> On the whole, experiences have been pretty good. Obviously there is
> some performance impact but we haven't yet had any reports of this
> causing major problems (though we will probably know more about this
> after 5.5 is released when the average user will first see i386
> packages built with PIE by default).

On Android, third party applications have always been compiled with
-fPIC, ever since the initial release of Android. As mentioned earlier
in this thread, the performance impacts of PIC and PIE are similar.

Starting in Android 4.1, all dynamically linked ARM [1] and x86 [2]
executables are compiled with PIE. Compiling with PIE on MIPS was
added in Android 4.3 [3]. Statically linked executables with PIE are
not supported today [4], although I'd love to see it in the future.

I have yet to hear any complaint, on x86 or ARM, about any real world
performance impact of PIE on Android, even though the code has been
live and in user's hands for almost 2 years.

[1] https://android.googlesource.com/platform/build/+/026a85b129e4540a4d8d40aace47aa0c69f609da
[2] https://android.googlesource.com/platform/build/+/d9d2e7a42c18a997ae47e4174713b5e2942044b5
[3] https://android.googlesource.com/platform/build/+/f1e4df72651f38208f209f8c60ee18213a38d21d
[4] http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.comp.gnu.binutils/56324


-- 
Nick Kralevich | Android Security | nnk () google com | 650.214.4037