Static linking is emphatically discouraged for all Red Hat Enterprise Linux releases. Static linking causes far more problems than it solves, and should be avoided at all costs.
The main drawback of static linking is that it is only guaranteed to work on the system it was built, and even so, only until the next release of glibc or libstdc++ (in the case of C++). There is no forward or backward compatibility with a static build. Furthermore, any security fixes (or general-purpose fixes) in subsequent updates to the libraries will not be avilable unless the affected statically linked executables are re-linked.
Additional reasons to avoid static linking include:
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Larger memory footprint.
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Slower application startup time.
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Reduced glibc features with static linking.
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Security measures like load address randomization cannot be used.
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Dynamic loading of shared objects outside of glibc is not supported.
