I am observing a difference when trying to do the same operation on GCC 4.4 and GCC 4.5. Because the code I am doing this with is proprietary, I am unable to provide it, but I am observing a similar failure with this simple test case.
What I am basically trying to do is have one shared library (libb) depend on another shared library (liba). When loading libb, I assume that liba should be loaded as well - even though libb is not necessarily using the symbols in liba.
What I am observing is when I compile with GCC 4.4, I observe that the liba is loaded, but if I compile with GCC 4.5, libb is not loaded.
I have a small test case that consists of two files, a.c and b.c . The contents of the files:
//a.c
int a(){
return 0;
}
//b.c
int b(){
return 0;
}
//c.c
#include <stdio.h>
int a();
int b();
int main()
{
printf("%d\n", a()+b());
return 0;
}
//test.sh
$CC -o liba.so a.c -shared
$CC -o libb.so b.c -shared -L. -la -Wl,-rpath-link .
$CC c.c -L. -lb -Wl,-rpath-link .
LD_LIBRARY_PATH=. ./a.out
This is my output with different versions of GCC
$ CC=gcc-4.4 ./test.sh
1
$ CC=gcc-4.5 ./test.sh
/tmp/cceJhAqy.o: In function `main':
c.c:(.text+0xf): undefined reference to `a'
collect2: ld returned 1 exit status
./test.sh: line 4: ./a.out: No such file or directory
$ CC=gcc-4.6 ./test.sh
/tmp/ccoovR0x.o: In function `main':
c.c:(.text+0xf): undefined reference to `a'
collect2: ld returned 1 exit status
./test.sh: line 4: ./a.out: No such file or directory
$
Can anyone explain what is happening? Another extra bit of information is that ldd on libb.so does show liba.so on GCC 4.4 but not on GCC 4.5.
EDIT
I changed test.sh to the following:
$CC -shared -o liba.so a.c
$CC -L. -Wl,--no-as-needed -Wl,--copy-dt-needed-entries -la -shared -o libb.so b.c -Wl,-rpath-link .
$CC -L. c.c -lb -Wl,-rpath-link .
LD_LIBRARY_PATH=. ./a.out
This gave the following output with GCC 4.5:
/usr/bin/ld: /tmp/cc5IJ8Ks.o: undefined reference to symbol 'a'
/usr/bin/ld: note: 'a' is defined in DSO ./liba.so so try adding it to the linker command line
./liba.so: could not read symbols: Invalid operation
collect2: ld returned 1 exit status
./test.sh: line 4: ./a.out: No such file or directory
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