Hello!
How do you want to solve the private data segment problem each instance of a library require (without virtual address room mapping)?hmmm, what kind of problem it is? and how it's solved on x86 platform for example?
Under Unix shared libraries don't manage it's instances, e.g. it's fullytransparent to how many processes a library is dynamically linked. To reach this, every library have it's own private data segment for each process it's mapped too. Also the library is compiled position independant, e.g. the library can be placed anywhere in the address room of an application. As effect the data segment addressing is done with a fixed offset. This is absolutly no problem under Unix as the library is mapped into the address space of an application with help of the MMU (the pages with the code are mapped to several process (-> shared) and the data segement pages are private for each process).
As we don't have virtual address rooms under MiNT yet we can't map the library in such way. If we want to share the library in memory the private data segment for each process the library is mapped too is always on the same position.
Regards, Frank -- ATARI FALCON 060 // MILAN 060 ----------------------------------------- http://www.cs.uni-magdeburg.de/~fnaumann/ e-Mail: fnaumann@freemint.de