JDK-8170635 -- adding a base library to java

[Magnus Ihse Bursie]

On 2024-05-06 16:36, Thomas Stüfe wrote:

> Not sure if you meant to address this mail to a specific person. I 
> assume with proposal you mean this: 
> https://mail.openjdk.org/pipermail/build-dev/2016-September/017746.html ?
>
> If yes, my proposal was to move dladdr out of the OpenJDK code base 
> into an independent library that would be maintained by IBM, 
> hopefully, and would be a prerequisite for building the JDK.
> If no, whose proposal did you mean?

Oh, this is an old bug you're picking up Suchismith!

I read through the discussion from 2016. It seems that the suggestion to 
make an external 3rd party library was only supported by Thomas, and 
that the general agreement among the other participants was that we 
should have a general, base-level "OSAL" (OS abstraction library) in the 
JDK, that could be used by both Hotspot and libjli, as well as other JDK 
libraries.

Creating such a library would be a much larger effort than just adding a 
AIX implementation of dladdr to it, if it existed. The current structure 
of the JDK does not readily lend itself to such a library, neither in 
terms of source code layout nor build system.

With that said, I do think it would be good if we had such a library. 
There are more cases than the AIX dladdr issue that is duplicated, like 
jio_snprintf() and friends. This has actually caused some headaches when 
doing static builds, since duplication of these functions are not 
allowed when creating a single linked instance. (The current duplication 
in dynamic libraries is just ugly and bad programming, not a compilation 
error.)

But it is a much larger question than just fixing an AIX issue.

/Magnus