/etc/ld.so.nohwcap missing

[jjos]

/etc/ld.so.nohwcap is accessed on every process launch, but it does not exist.

Example:
strace ls 2>&1 | grep /etc/ld.so.nohwcap
strace df 2>&1 | grep /etc/ld.so.nohwcap
strace sleep 0 2>&1 | grep /etc/ld.so.nohwcap

Output is one or more:
access("/etc/ld.so.nohwcap", F_OK) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory)

This file should exist (what does it do?), or the futile accesses should be removed. Doing so will improve process launch times.

This was confirmed on Ubuntu 10.04

[Charles Kearney (charkear)]

I can not run programs I compile from the terminal. When I do strace i get this error.

[Yuriy Vidineev (adeptg)]

This isn't a bug, read man ld.so.
...
/etc/ld.so.nohwcap When this file is present the dynamic linker will load the non-optimized version of a library, even if the CPU supports the optimized version.
...

[John Drinkwater (johndrinkwater)]

Think the original report queried whether it could be cached with the comment ‘or the futile accesses should be removed’ to avoid the noise in traces; is the state of the file intended to change ld behaviour during load, should it?

[Joachim Durchholz (jo-durchholz)]

I can confirm that the strace noise is quite annoying.
Particularly for programs that load a huge list of plugins and libraries, such as xfce4-settings-manager.
(A similar problem exists for programs checking a long list of fallbacks for translation and configuration files.)

I don't think the issue is invalid, a fix would require escalating this quite far upstream though.

[quequotion (quequotion)]

This is a real problem.

[quequotion (quequotion)]

Could someone explain to me what the &%$# I am doing here right now?

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.