I received a question by mail the other day from Randy, about sonames and in particular their versioning which I already discussed about a couple of times. On the other hand, his concerns are good enough to warrant for another blog post on the matter, hoping not to bore my readers too much with it.
First of all, let me repeat that there are a number of different names that a shared library “owns”, on Unix and Unix-like systems based on ELF:
- the actual name of the filename;
- the name the link editor (or build-time linker if you prefer,
ld) uses to link to it; - the name the loader (or dynamic linker if you prefer,
ld.so) uses to find it.
The obvious way to correlate all of them together is to use symbolic links; and that’s why your /usr/lib directory is full of those. But how that happen?
When linking, the link editor (ld) can take a library as parameter in two different ways: either with full path to the library (such as /usr/lib/libcrypto.so.0.9.8) or via a link-library parameter (-lcrypto); in the first case, the linker know exactly which files it has to link against; in the latter, though, it has to go look for it.
The paths where the linker search for the library is worth discussing separately, and all in all the library search path list is not something that is important to the aim of this article. What we do care about is the basename the linker is going to look out for; well, the answer is easy, it applies the same substitution you’d have with sed and s/^-l(.+)$/lib1.so/ — it prepends lib and adds .so to the end of the library name. This is why all the libraries you can link to have a .so suffix-only variant, beside the full name and the version-suffix symlink.
Obviously, when the link-editor adds the dependencies on the libraries to the output, it has to use some kind of name; the full path is not a viable option (you might be linking to a non-installed library that will be installed later), so you can either use the library base name (PE – the format used by Windows – did this, but Microsoft seems to have changed idea when .NET came around), or find some other value to link (no pun intended) it to, which is what we’re concerned with here, since that’s what Unix (and Linux) do.
Each library declares its canonical name (the soname, standing for Shared Object Name); the linker will copy that value from the tag called DT_SONAME to a DT_NEEDED entry tag of the output file. Now, these two tags are really what’s important in this discussion; as you saw, the two are respectively consumed and produced by the link editor. The loader, instead, only cares about DT_NEEDED: it uses that tag to know the filename of the libraries to look for in its library search path (that does not necessary have to be the same as the one for the link editor).
Actually, it’s not all true; there are a number of libraries that don’t declare a soname at all, in some cases that’s correct, for instance plugins don’t need a soname at all since they are never linked against, but a good many times, it’s actually a bug in the build system itself. But that’s a topic for another day.
The loader, for good or bad, does not check that the value in DT_SONAME of the loaded library corresponds to the DT_NEEDED tag it encountered — this is why symlinking libraries with incompatible ABIs seem to work at first: the loader does not fail to load them. This means that it really doesn’t matter what a DT_NEEDED tag points to, as long as, within the library path, there is a file (or symlink) with that name. This lets you do some cool but braindead thinks, which I’d rather not write of myself.
To ensure that the loader is able to find the library, then, there is need to have the symlinks in place that correspond to the name it’s going to look for. Now this can be done by two pieces of software, at two different times. The first is, well, libtool, which takes care of the task both at build-time and install-time, and makes both the link used by the loader, and that used by the link editor to find the library. A number of other build systems imitate that behaviour as well.
The second component that does so is ldconfig, but only on GNU systems; by default it recreates all the symlinks to sonames in the library search path (of the loader); with various options, it processes particular libraries or paths. The result is pretty nifty, but not portable. I discovered this myself a long time ago when working on Gentoo/FreeBSD, as the preplib command from Portage failed on that architecture.
With hindsight, I wish I didn’t ask for preplib to die, but rather rewrite it to use scanelf to do the job rather than ldconfig.
What probably confused Randy, is that many documents out there assumes the libtool/Linux semantic of soname and versioning. I call it libtool/Linux because libtool changes its soname semantic depending on the operating system it’s working on, as again I found out while working on Gentoo/FreeBSD. In Linux, it produces a file with a three-components name, and sets DT_SONAME to just the first component; on FreeBSD (by default) it creates a file with a two-components name, and sets DT_SONAME to the full name.
In Gentoo/FreeBSD, we hack libtool to use the same naming scheme as Linux, since that is what library developers tend to think about when setting the version components. Without this hack, each minor version of glib would have a new soname, requiring all the linked software to be re-built, even if the ABI didn’t change, or changed in a compatible way.
I admit I haven’t even started looking up the reasoning for either the version scheme; they are probably mostly historical; in the case of FreeBSD, having the soname and the full name to match is probably needed to avoid the need for symlinks (as ldconfig does not create them as I said above). In the case of Linux, I’m not really sure why so much complexity. Without digressing too much, the components passed to -version-info don’t match directly the actual components used in either the Linux or FreeBSD semantics; they are both related by way of not-too-simple arithmetic functions.
At any rate, neither the link editor nor the loader have a real concept of “ABI version”, which is why they don’t enforce it at all. So you can have libraries that don’t even update their ABI version at all, or others that use the full version as ABI, and bump it even if there aren’t incompatible changes.
So to answer Randy’s final question, this happens because each project is free to decide what its soname is, and thus its soversion. In the case of OpenSSL, they use a three-components version that is the same of the file name, and of the version of the released package, as can be seen by looking at the following scanelf -S output from the tinderbox :
tinderbox ~ # scanelf -S /usr/lib/libcrypto.so.*
TYPE SONAME FILE
ET_DYN libcrypto.so.0.9.8 /usr/lib/libcrypto.so.0.9.8
ET_DYN libcrypto.so.1.0.0 /usr/lib/libcrypto.so.1.0.0
Code language: PHP (php)Any document that implies explicitly that the soname has to consist of the library name and its ABI version, is simply wrong. That is a practice that definitely should be followed, but there are no technical restrictions in there, they are only practical restrictions.
Yes, it is a sorry state of the affairs.