Weak symbol linking when loading dynamic libraries

[k***@gmail.com]

Hi,
I have a problem when dynamically loading two libraries on Android, which
seems to be able to work on Linux. I have a situation where I have two
shared libraries, let's call them libA.so and libB.so. libA.so gets loaded
via dlopen() and uses a singleton. libA.so at some point loads libB.so via
dlopen(), which also uses the same singleton. Unfortunately, the dynamic
linker cannot merge those tho singleton symbols into one, and the result is
two singleton instances. nm -C -D shows the instance to be a weak symbol
"V" in both libraries. Is there any way to make the dynamic linker merge
those symbols?

['Ryan Prichard' via android-ndk]

While the build-time linker prefers a strong symbol definition to a weak
definition, I don't think the runtime loader has that preference. It always
uses the first symbol it finds (with a binding of either STB_GLOBAL or
STB_WEAK). I *think* this is common behavior for ELF linkers.

Maybe it works on (glibc) Linux because libA.so is loaded with RTLD_GLOBAL,
which would make its symbols available when loading any other library. The
linker could then use libA.so's copy for both libA.so and libB.so.
Android's dlopen recognizes the RTLD_GLOBAL flag, and it affects dlsym, but
it doesn't make a shared object's symbols available during later dlopen
calls:

https://android.googlesource.com/platform/bionic/+/30b17e32f0b403a97cef7c4d1fcab471fa316340/linker/linker_namespaces.cpp#100

We might want to change this behavior eventually, but that wouldn't be
useful for a while. We have a bug filed internally for that --
http://b/110188176.

As the comment in that code indicates, you could mark the libraries with
DF_1_GLOBAL, but unfortunately, that only works with P and up. (Technically
M and up, but there's a bug with O MR1.)

For M and up, if you could load all of your shared objects with a single
dlopen call, that would avoid the problem, but I'm not sure if that's
practical. (e.g. Maybe use System.loadLibrary on one shared object that
links against every other shared object in your app?)

I suspect placing each singleton instance in only one shared object is the
best fix. If the variable instances are generated using templates, then I
think you can use "extern template" declarations to control where specific
instantiations are emitted.

-Ryan

Post by k***@gmail.com
Hi,
I have a problem when dynamically loading two libraries on Android, which
seems to be able to work on Linux. I have a situation where I have two
shared libraries, let's call them libA.so and libB.so. libA.so gets loaded
via dlopen() and uses a singleton. libA.so at some point loads libB.so via
dlopen(), which also uses the same singleton. Unfortunately, the dynamic
linker cannot merge those tho singleton symbols into one, and the result is
two singleton instances. nm -C -D shows the instance to be a weak symbol
"V" in both libraries. Is there any way to make the dynamic linker merge
those symbols?
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