Are Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Fedora Core fundamentally sound?

[Dennis Gilmore]

Once upon a time Saturday 10 March 2007, Wiktor Rzeczkowski wrote:
> I did some testing of RHEL v.4 U4 AS, FC3, FC5 and FC6 and seem to have
> been finding that, soon after a fresh installation of the OS on a
> non-networked machine, many files were automatically changing. I also seem
> to have been finding that some time after package update, the files were
> automatically changing again.
>
> /bin/ls is one of the files that were changing. The file is part of
> coreutils package. The following are MD5 checksums for /bin/ls on the
> specified RHEL and FC systems immediately after installation of the
> specified coreutils package (current version). The checksums are computed
> by 'md5sum /bin/ls' and the versions of OS and of coreutils are displayed
> by 'cat /etc/redhat-release' and 'rpm -q coreutils' (no quotes),
> respectively.
what you are seeing is prelink in action.  from prelink's man page

prelink is a program which modifies ELF shared libraries and ELF dynamically 
linked binaries, so that the time which dynamic linker needs for their 
relocation at startup significantly decreases and also due to fewer 
relocations the run-time memory consumption decreases too (especially number 
of unshareable pages). Such  prelinking  information  is  only used if all 
its dependant libraries have not changed since prelinking, otherwise programs 
are relocated normally.

you are free to disable prelink if you want.

Dennis
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