Mailing List Archive

On Thu, 5 Oct 1995, Alan Burlison wrote:

> It's broke! Linux-FT includes ELF support, but Configure fails to find
> most of the symbols in the .so libraries under /usr/lib. The reason is
> that nm is duff. The second column of it's output contains '?' in
> addition to the usual 'T', 'D' etc. There are two possible fixes - get a
> working version of nm or use 'objdump -p' and search for the string
> '.text'. I have frigged configure as a temporary measure, but some
> standard resolution needs to be found. Any suggestions?

I don't know what Linux-FT is, but it sure looks like it's ELF support is
incomplete. Configure works just fine on at least some ELF distributions.
My suggested workaround for the moment would be
./Configure -Dusenm=false
or answer 'n' to the nm prompt.

What is the output of nm --version? Perhaps we can put a test in the
Linux hints file to check for this problem.

> By the way, does the ELF version of Linux support a programmatic
> interface to shared libraries? I can't find any documentation that
> suggests that it does. I assume that this means that dynamically
> loadable extensions are not available :-(

Good news: dynamic loading of extensions under ELF Linux should work
just fine. Of course, that assumes you've got a working ELF distribution
:-).

Andy Dougherty doughera@lafcol.lafayette.edu

On Thu, 5 Oct 1995, Alan Burlison wrote:

> It's broke! Linux-FT includes ELF support, but Configure fails to find
> most of the symbols in the .so libraries under /usr/lib. The reason is
> that nm is duff. The second column of it's output contains '?' in
> addition to the usual 'T', 'D' etc. There are two possible fixes - get a
> working version of nm or use 'objdump -p' and search for the string
> '.text'. I have frigged configure as a temporary measure, but some
> standard resolution needs to be found. Any suggestions?

Please enumerate what parts of ELF (libc, ld.so, etc.) that Linux-FT
contains. If I'm remembering right, Linux-FT is an extremely nasty
distribution that came out with all ELF stuff before ELF was out of
alpha. (Note: I may be misremembering. Please don't base any decisions on
that statement without examining the issue yourself.)

A libc of around 5.1.x would be good, as would an ld.so of 1.7.x and gcc
of 2.7.x. Please check the version of nm, if possible, and include a
sample dump of libc.so.*.

If you do have recent versions, it may be you just have a bad nm, or that
I've missed something recent in ELF support. I haven't been keeping up
with the very latest, but I didn't think there any been any major changes.

> By the way, does the ELF version of Linux support a programmatic
> interface to shared libraries? I can't find any documentation that
> suggests that it does. I assume that this means that dynamically
> loadable extensions are not available :-(

This suggests you have a badly mangled ELF distribution, or you didn't
know to look in dlopen.h. That where the dynamic loading is mentioned.
Believe me, ELF had _better_ support dynamic loading! It certainly is
supposed to, and it works fine for my tests.

> Alan Burlison aburlison@cix.compulink.co.uk

--
Kenneth Albanowski (kjahds@kjahds.com, CIS: 70705,126)