Is there any way to force PIE?

[GBit]

I think that's what RANDEXEC used to do, right? Randomize the base address of the executable? I know it's not supported anymore, but is there some other way to accomplish this?

[PaX Team]

RANDEXEC was a kernel-only approach to accomplish a similar effect to what randomizing the load address of a PIE binary has - all without actually having to build a PIE. so RANDEXEC didn't 'force PIE', it worked with normal ELF executables and it really wasn't the best way to accomplish executable randomization and existed mostly to prove that it was possible to do it at all. so no, there's no other way, if you want to randomize the executables as well, build them as PIE.

[GBit]

Alright, thank you.

[sfs6dzs]

Can it be that an option is to by default build them with PIE? Why distributions provide RELRO,Canary,PIE etc. for binaries for the system /sbin/* and NOT for the ones the user compiles?