Windows® via C/C++, Fifth Edition

Binding Modules

Rebasing is very important and greatly improves the performance of the entire system. However, you can do even more to improve performance. Let’s say that you have properly rebased all your application’s modules. Recall from Chapter 19 our discussion about how the loader looks up the address of all the imported symbols. The loader writes the symbol’s virtual address into the executable module’s import section. This allows references to the imported symbols to actually get to the correct memory location.

Let’s think about this for a second. If the loader is writing the virtual addresses of the imported symbols into the .exe module’s import section, the pages that back the import section are written to. Because these pages are copy-on-write, ...