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But of course ELF constructors fuck that all up, because they get started before main() does its first step even, after all. It takes any control away we have in scheduling precisely when to do what.

And people do terrible things in ELF constructors: load configuration, check if kernel APIs are available (which typically means looking at /proc/, /sys/ or some other API VFS), pre-opening some fds, and so on. All these are things you really don't want to do before things are properly mounted, …