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[draft] RFC: making aux vector information available externally


(apologies as this is a repost but I think the first one didn't make it 
through)

Greetings,

There is information of use to libraries contained in the aux vector
that I believe should be easier to access.

User applications today can get to the aux vector via argv but  this
doesn't help shared libraries out one bit. Granted the implementor of a
shared library could crawl up the stack and do evil introspection but I
don't see that as being a desirable thing to do. A shared library could
also be built n-ways to cover the many combinations of say cache-line
size, page size, processor and so on and then just install the right
library as a function of the installer. I don't think this is a
desirable course of action.

As a simple matter I'd like to suggest the potential addition of say
something like get_aux_vector() which would return a pointer to either a
copy of the vector or a pointer to the original stuffed into a static at
say _dl_sysdep_start.

A more complex approach might be to return an interpretation of the
vector that was more structured and architected than the raw contents of
the vector but I'll leave that those that reply to this note if that is
a worthwhile avenue to pursue as compared to some future offering from
the Ministry of Silly Walks.

Regards,

Tom



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