Hmm... I'm still trying to grasp exactly what this involves. You mention recompile time... do you know if that would be done automatically by prelinker?
There's a good little HOWTO here: http://www.research.att.com/~leonb/objprelink/ As it describes, you compile up your .o files for the whole of KDE, then run the little program on them. It massages the binaries replacing calls to external library routines with local stubs, then points the local stub to the external library routine. Instead of doing one external library link per *function call*, it does one external library link per *function*.
It sounds rather enticing, I would love to have my programs start faster, especially things like Konqi that would benefit substantially from prelinking.
The author claims Konqueror starts 50% faster and believes that the bottleneck is now his disks. If you have a lot of memory which will allow Konqueror and it's libraries to sit in the Linux cache it'll start *very* quickly. It's developments like this, being done in public, which give me that warm feeling only open source can give... :) Seeing as SuSE is known to be a platform this works on, I hope the KDE guys there will provide at least experimental RPMs which will allow people to benefit from this even if KDE themselves decide it has to wait for 2.2.1.