RFR: JDK-8055141 Catch linker errors earlier in the JVM build by not allowing unresolved externals

Erik Helin erik.helin at oracle.com
Thu Sep 18 12:31:21 UTC 2014


Hi Mikael,

thanks for fixing this! Looks good, Reviewed.

Erik

On 2014-09-18 10:39, Mikael Gerdin wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> As you may know, linking an ELF shared object allows unresolved external
> symbols at link time. This is sometimes problematic for JVM developers since
> the JVM does not depend on unresolved external symbols and all missing symbols
> at build time are due to mistakes, usually missing includes of inline
> definitions.
>
> In order to disallow such unresolved externals I propose that we add
> "-z defs" to the linker command line when linking the JVM, thereby making
> unresolved externals a build-time error instead of a run-time failure when
> dlopen:ing the newly built JVM for the first time.
>
> On Windows ans OSX this is already the default linker behavior.
> I took the liberty of modifying the bsd make file since I believe that bsd
> uses the GNU linker which supports the "-z defs" flag. I'm not sure about the
> behavior or flags appropriate for AIX so I didn't change the AIX makefiles.
>
>
> On Solaris, linking with "-z defs" failed at first with the following message:
>
> Undefined                       first referenced
>   symbol                             in file
> gethostbyname                       ostream.o  (symbol belongs to implicit
> dependency /lib/64/libnsl.so.1)
> inet_addr                           ostream.o  (symbol belongs to implicit
> dependency /lib/64/libnsl.so.1)
> ld: fatal: symbol referencing errors. No output written to libjvm.so
>
> This has not caused any failures earlier since libsocket depends on libnsl, so
> in practice the symbols are always present at runtime, but with the "-z defs"
> flag the linker requires the dependency to be explicitly stated.
> I fixed the issure by appending -lnsl to the link-time libraries for the
> Solaris build.
>
> Webrev: http://cr.openjdk.java.net/~mgerdin/8055141/webrev.0/
> Bug: https://bugs.openjdk.java.net/browse/JDK-8055141
>
> Testing:
> * Verified that the additional flag causes build-time errors on all platforms
> in the presence of unresolved external symbols.
> * Verified that the build passes on all Oracle-supported platforms with the
> new flag.
>
> Thanks
> /Mikael
>


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