Re:Sorry state of dynamic libraries on Linux
by quotemstr on Monday September 17, 2012 @06:52AM
(#4531977)
> The only problem described in this article appears to be of performance
Correctness is a serious problem. ELF symbol interposition is dangerous because it can be done unintentionally. For the most part, the flexibility afforded by ELF goes unused except for LD_PRELOAD, and LD_PRELOAD can be accommodated using a safer and less general mechanism.
Systems with module-specific binding don't have to worry about unintentional symbol interposition. On these systems, adding a module to a process never causes another unrelated module to sometimes stop working depending on exact load order. On ELF systems, this catastrophe happens.
Re:Sorry state of dynamic libraries on Linux
by dllthomas on Monday September 17, 2012 @11:08AM
(#4532887)
It would seem that somehow warning about interpositions would be the right thing. Makes it easier to debug weirdness, warns users if someone surreptitiously set LD_PRELOAD, but doesn't get in the way when someone wants to use the functionality.
The title of the article is "Sorry state of dynamic libraries on Linux" which implies that other OSes do it better. But the article does not cover what other OSes are even doing.
I'd love to see:
1) Objective and compelling figures that show that changing the current system would result a significant improvement.
2) A discussion about what other OSes are doing and justification of why Linux is in such a "sorry state" (or an article title that isn't linkbait).