[lldb-dev] dlsym() and RTLD_FIRST

[Todd Fiala]

Probably the way I'd look at this right now is that support in Linux is a
bit dicey and we're doing our best to stabilize (starting with single path
for remote/local debugging, and making that stable and fast).  In an effort
to stabilize, I'd prefer to limit how much code change we do on the Linux
end until we have a more stable product.

So while we could potentially take that out, I'd rather avoid making
changes just because it might be simpler, as it might also add yet another
error scenario on the Linux side.  Right now I value similarity to MacOSX
execution over code reduction.  Once we're a lot more stable on the Linux
side, I'd be much more interested in revisiting with some actual use cases
to see diffs in performance and scope of usage.

Just my 2 cents...


On Tue, Aug 26, 2014 at 3:47 PM, Zachary Turner <zturner at google.com> wrote:

> The review is up on the LLVM side.  One point which was raised, and which
> I agree with, is that the presence of the string makes the class much
> heavier.  This string is only needed to mimic MacOSX's RTLD_FIRST behavior
> on other posix platforms.  However, going back through the history of when
> this was added, I never actually saw a use case from anyone saying "we
> *need* this on Linux".  See the full original thread at [1].  But the TL;DR
> is that the flag is nice to have on MacOSX, and the filename comparison was
> added to Linux to maintain parity.
>
> If nobody actually knows of a specific example of why this is necessary on
> Linux, can we just remove this behavior on Linux?  My understanding is that
> the only thing which will change by removing this for Linux is the
> following: Imagine a plugin X is loaded, and X has a library dependency on
> Y and Z.  X doesn't contain the plugin Initialize or Terminate symbol, but
> Y or Z does.  With the filename comparison code, LoadPlugin would fail, and
> without it, it would succeed and use the symbol found in Y or Z.  I can
> understand that with the comparison the algorithm is a bit better, but it
> seems such an extremely unusual edge case that I don't think it's a big
> deal to remove it from the Linux side.
>
> Thoughts?
>
> [1] -
> http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.debugging.lldb.devel/300/focus=302
>
>
> On Thu, Aug 21, 2014 at 5:27 PM, Greg Clayton <gclayton at apple.com> wrote:
>
>> Sounds good to me. Hopefully if they don't want that they might accept an
>> extra boolean argument that can specify to only look in the current shared
>> library and then we can switch over to using LLVM's DynamicLibrary.
>>
>> > On Aug 21, 2014, at 4:22 PM, Zachary Turner <zturner at google.com> wrote:
>> >
>> > This seems like the only case we ever want, so I'm going to post a
>> patch to LLVM's DynamicLibrary class to use RTLD_FIRST on Apple, and a
>> similar method of checking the module filespec on other platforms, and see
>> if they accept it.  If so, I will convert our Plugin code to use LLVM's
>> DynamicLibrary and then delete our DynamicLibrary
>> >
>> >
>> > On Thu, Aug 21, 2014 at 4:08 PM, Greg Clayton <gclayton at apple.com>
>> wrote:
>> >
>> > > On Aug 21, 2014, at 3:31 PM, Zachary Turner <zturner at google.com>
>> wrote:
>> > >
>> > > Can someone explain this flag to me?
>> >
>> > It says "only look in this binary, don't look in any others. We are
>> looking for a plug-in initialization function and we don't want to get one
>> back from another dylib.
>> >
>> > As Enrico said, the email from a while back details this:
>> >
>> > http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.comp.debugging.lldb.devel/305
>> >
>> > >  I've read the documentation, but it's still not clear to me.  If you
>> ask dlsym() to search some module X, why would it ever search modules other
>> than X?
>> >
>> > I don't know but it does.
>> >
>> > >
>> > > The reason I ask about this is that llvm support library already has
>> a DynamicLibrary class whose purpose almost exactly matches what we're
>> using the Host::DynamicLibrary related functions for.  However, it doesn't
>> use the RTLD_FIRST flag, and so I'm not sure what the implications are of
>> us using it and deleting our own DynamicLibrary code.
>> >
>> > It would be nice if we could specify this flag so we either find the
>> symbol from libx.dylib or we don't. We don't want to find the symbol in
>> liby.dylib and call it in our case.
>> >
>>
>>
>
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-- 
Todd Fiala | Software Engineer | tfiala at google.com | 650-943-3180
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