Re: Possible ld-so bug.

Philip Blundell (pb@nexus.co.uk)
Tue, 16 Feb 1999 14:12:26 +0000


>Well I've been called a lot of things, but not a "random user" before ;)
>I don't think I should have to recompile all the tools to `static` if I
>wish to rebuild glibc with the "latest-and-greatest" compiler. This
>problem is certainly going to come up again. If the developers of ld.so
>would respond, maybe its as simple as renaming ld.so.cache before
>`make install`.

It's not really an ld.so problem. All the binaries currently running on your
system will have libc.so and other libraries mmap'd. If you install a new
copy of libc.so on top of the old one, without either deleting or moving the
old library out of the way, the effect will be that these running programs end
up with a random mixture of pages from the old and new libraries. This
internal inconsistency is what leads to the crash. If you get a crash during
installation of libc your system can be left in an inconsistent state and
quite possibly this will mean that no binaries at all will run.

By either deleting or moving libc.so.6 prior to installation you ensure that
currently-running programs retain an intact copy of the old library; new
programs will get the new library (also hopefully intact) and everybody is
happy.

p.

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