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For some reason, during TacoSprint 2026 I decided to see if we could tackle relocatable binaries in Nix.

I enjoy these lofty goals to push Nix and the surrounding ecosystem forward. I am bold if not stupid .

I left the last earlier post with one potential idea of how to get there:

We could patch the Linux kernel so that $ORIGIN is supported in PT_INTERP and the shebang.

I waded through the complexity of sending patches over email (turns out I actually enjoy this workflow!), and sent a proposal to the Linux kernel mailing list.

My first attempt here proposed simply adding direct support for $ORIGIN in the Virtual File System (VFS) subsystem.