For more on this topic, here's Rich Felker:
+++Dynamic linking (without fixed load addresses) fundamentally requires +at least one dirty page per dso that uses symbols. Making calls (but +never taking the address explicitly) to functions within the same dso +does not require a dirty page by itself, but will with ELF unless you +use -Bsymbolic or hidden symbols when linking.
+ +ELF uses significant additional stack space for the kernel to pass all +the ELF data structures to the newly created process image. These are +located above the argument list and environment. This normally adds 1 +dirty page to the process size.
+ +The ELF dynamic linker has its own data segment, adding one or more +dirty pages. I believe it also performs relocations on itself.
+ +The ELF dynamic linker makes significant dynamic allocations to manage +the global symbol table and the loaded dso's. This data is never +freed. It will be needed again if libdl is used, so unconditionally +freeing it is not possible, but normal programs do not use libdl. Of +course with glibc all programs use libdl (due to nsswitch) so the +issue was never addressed.
+ +ELF also has the issue that segments are not page-aligned on disk. +This saves up to 4k on disk, but at the expense of using an additional +dirty page in most cases, due to a large portion of the first data +page being filled with a duplicate copy of the last text page.
+ +The above is just a partial list of the tiny memory penalties of ELF +dynamic linking, which eventually add up to quite a bit. The smallest +I've been able to get a process down to is 8 dirty pages, and the +above factors seem to mostly account for it (but some were difficult +to measure).
+
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