Re: Instanciation of global variables in shared library : recent changes ?

[Jan Seiffert]

Helfer Thomas schrieb:
> Hi,
> 
> I already posted this question on fr.comp.lang.c++ without response.
> 
> I am experiencing some trouble in the instatiation of global
> variables in recent ubuntu versions. I don't know if this question is
> directly related to g++ or the linker as the following example works
> fine on debian squeeze with gcc 4.7 and fails on the two last
> versions of ubuntu. If the question is not relevant in this mailing
> list, please tell me where I shall redirect it.
> 
> I now show a simple code snipset to illustrate the trouble.
> 
> Consider the following code in file A.cxx :
> 
> #include<iostream> struct A { A(){ std::cout << "A" << std::endl; } 
> };
> 
> A a; // global variable !!
> 
> This file is used to produce a shared library libA.so : g++ --shared
> -fPIC A.cxx -o libA.so
> 
> Consider now an empty main in file test.cxx: #include<cstdlib> int
> main(void){return EXIT_SUCCESS;}
> 
> This file is turned into an executable which is linked with the
> previous library: g++ test.cxx -o test -L. -lA
> 
> on debian squeeze (an all previous versions of linux) : this prints
> "A" du to the constructor of the global variable on ubuntu linux
> precise pangolin, nothing is printed !
> 
> This is really annoying and none of __attribute__ I tried solved the
> problem. This is also strange to see that if the libA is dlopened,
> the program displays the expected message ("A")...
> 
> Could anyone tell me : 1) what has changed 2) if the previous
> behaviour can be retrieved
> 

This is just a hunch, but i guess what you are seeing is the linker option
"--as-needed". On Ubuntu (and propably a lot of other modern Distros) it is
set by default to reduce cross linking and dependencies and app start time.
On Debian it looks like it is not set by default.

There is no linking dependency between your main file and the lib.
With --as-needed the linker discards the supplied "-lA", because your program
does not seem to use it.
You can check the list of used libs with tools like ldd or objdump.

To remedy the situation you either have to import some symbol from libA
or you have to switch between "--no-as-needed" and back to "--as-needed",
like so:
g++ test.cxx -o test -L . -Wl,--no-as-needed -lA -Wl,--as-needed

> Thanks for any help

Greetings
        Jan