RFR: JDK-8319516 - Native library suffix impact on the library loading in AIX- Java Class Loader [v4]

[Maurizio Cimadamore]

On Mon, 18 Mar 2024 17:43:45 GMT, Suchismith Roy <sroy at openjdk.org> wrote:

>> Allow support for both .a and .so files in AIX.
>> If .so file is not found, allow fallback to .a extension.
>> JBS Issue: [JDK-8319516](https://bugs.openjdk.org/browse/JDK-8319516)
>
> Suchismith Roy has updated the pull request incrementally with one additional commit since the last revision:
> 
>   trraling spaces

I'd like to uplevel the discussion a bit. This PR started off to tweak the way in which `System::load` worked in AIX. We then discussed a bunch of options, talked about `Symbol::libraryLookup` and verified that this lookup allows to load libraries as expected in AIX. There's some jextract issues which need to be worked out, but that's outside the scope of this PR.

That said, is there anything that we feel could be improved in terms of library loading support with `System::load` ? My conclusion was that, given that in this case we needed a fully versioned archive member, it is hard to implement and/or to expose as a simple `mapLibraryName` add-on. Is that correct?

If you feel that there's not much that `System::load` can do for these cases, then I'd suggest we close this PR, and perhaps move the discussion about jextract either on `jextract-dev` or on `panama-dev`. Thanks!

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PR Comment: https://git.openjdk.org/jdk/pull/17945#issuecomment-2016237758