I don't disagree that the loader and the libc should be decoupled, but it's not as simple a split as you're making it out to be. The reason they're tightly cou

I don't disagree that the loader and the libc should be decoupled, but it's not as simple a split as you're making it out to be. The reason they're tightly coupled is because there needs to be a bridge between Sys-V ELF ABI and the C runtime, and it makes sense for the implementation of that bridge to use libc itself which means special-casing the bootstrapping of libc during program loading. glibc isn't unique here btw - musl libc ships its own loader that does the exact same thing as rtld (parse auxv/envp off the stack, relocate itself and load libc, initialize the CRT, then load the rest of the program's SOs in order). Even if they were fully decoupled it is not unreasonable for software targeting newer versions of an operating system to only run on that version or later. Linux is actually the outlier here where the syscall interface is stable enough to make this a non-obvious problem. There's a universe where you can load multiple versions of the same libc into the same address space but that isn't ELF, and it's not common. aiui the only reason PE can support e.g. multiple versions of malloc/free in the same executable is due to two level namespaces in symbol relocation tables. --- edit: another observation is that for a functioning ELF loader you basically need a three stage bootstrap. Stage one parses the stack passed by the kernel and performs self-relocation. You need that to make non-static function calls and read/write global variables. Stage two loads libc and initializes the CRT with stuff like environment variables, aux vector, any dso for syscalls passed by the kernel, etc. That has to coupled because POSIX specifies stupid stuff like "getenv" and "argv" requires the loader to know how to move from the stack passed by the kernel to the memory reserved by the CRT that gets used by the final executable. Finally in stage 3 it can relocate and load shared objects and run any constructor functions pre-main, before jumping to start where the precompiled CRT start (then jump to main goes). So if you want an ELF loader on Sys-V you probably need to couple the loader to the libc, just for libc to work at all. Unless you want to specify a bunch of behavior and binary layout in the C standard. None of this is designed by glibc, it's the simplest way to go from exec to main.