alt Hacker NewsI was confused on what $ORIGIN means, so, macroexpanding the article a bit
https://fzakaria.com/2026/06/21/nix-needs-relocatable-binari...
> The loader in Linux however natively supports the variable $ORIGIN which translates to “the directory containing the executable.”
https://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man8/ld.so.8.html
But, if ld.so supports $ORIGIN already, why does the kernel needs to support it also? Or rather, why can't the kernel leverage ld.so and do this entirely on userspace?
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One point mentioned in the first link you included is support of $ORIGIN in #! scripts - that would need kernel support.
You have the right idea but the wrong specifics. The boundary you're alluding to isn't the kernel/userspace boundary, it's the `libc` boundary, which is admittedly privileged by convention if not by Ring 0.
On most Linux systems this is regrettably `glibc` (in a container where you get to choose everyone chooses the superior option of `musl`), on all Darwin systems this is `libstandard`.
This thread is more concerned with Linux, so you are probably dealing with `/lib64/ld-linux-x86-64.so.2`, which operates in userspace but is by convention and opacity quite clearly part of "the system".
The kernel modification is a much bigger, much weirder side effect of a weird Nix loyalty test around shebang lines in shell scripts, on which is has opted to be intentionally and violently incompatible with everything for no benefit other than incompatibility.
$ORIGIN was only supported when the loader was looking for other dependencies. The loader itself (field PT_INTERP) is loaded by the kernel. So prior to this change, every program must hardcode the absolute path to ld.so. With support for an $ORIGIN-relative loader, each program could use its own copy of ld.so.