ldd equivalent on android

Question

I have a libTest.so that does not load on some devices. logcat is absolutely useless. Using arm-linux-androideabi-readelf.exe -d libTest.so I was able to see all required libs that libTest.so needs. I pulled them all in, into the same folder on my local PC.

How can I find out which symbols is missing and in which library? I have only standard set of tools from the NDK (nm, readelf, objdump etc). Which tool and how can I use so that it parses my libTest.so and all dependent libs as well and tells me which symbol prevents my lib from loading on the target device.

Risser

<NDK_DIR>/toolchains/llvm/prebuild/<HOST_OS>/bin/<ARCH>-strings | grep ^lib | grep so – Catabolism

Answer 1

Thanks to android developers. My feature request was implemented :) Now we have ndk-depends, a tool that allows to troubleshoot dependencies.

Edit: it doesn't do full symbol resolution though. E.g. if you build against Android-14 and try to use methods that didn't exist in old Androids, then this tool won't list missing symbols. This part was left as a TODO in ndk-depends.

Risser

unfortunately ndk-depends was removed in ndk r19: github.com/android/ndk/wiki/Changelog-r19#announcements – Stickle

Answer 2

If you don't have the NDK try doing:

readelf --dynamic filename | grep NEEDED

to display the dynamic libraries for an elf binary.

Yurev

Answer 3

At Android terminal try this:
strings /path/to/your/file | grep ^lib Found here: https://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=2737126&page=5

Cornflakes

Answer 4

You can do something like:

$ /lib/ld-linux.so.2 --list filename

This is because ldd is just a shell script that works like a wrapper around the dynamic loader. The name of the dynamic loader, i.e., ld-{version}.so might differ.

Melanosis

Android appears to use /system/bin/linker and not /lib/ld-linux.so . Anyhow I can't get linker to output anything – Bathypelagic

I just get Segmentation fault when invoking /system/bin/linker directly, no matter what arguments I use! – Khoury