RFR: JDK-8320005 : Allow loading of shared objects with .a extension on AIX [v7]

[Martin Doerr]

On Fri, 5 Jan 2024 12:10:59 GMT, Martin Doerr <mdoerr at openjdk.org> wrote:

> I have tried to build jextract (https://github.com/openjdk/jextract/tree/jdk22) with LLVM (https://github.com/llvm/llvm-project/releases/download/llvmorg-16.0.4/clang+llvm-16.0.4-powerpc64-ibm-aix-7.2.tar.xz). I noticed that llvm mainly consists of .a files. So, I think we need to support that for FFI compatibility with other libraries and open source projects.

Seems like this change is not sufficient for that. `clang` is compiled to `libclang.a` on AIX, but `libclang.so` on linux. I'm getting "System error: Exec format error" when trying to load `libclang.a` via `System.loadLibrary(libName);`.
So the question remains: Are .a files really supposed to be dynamically loadable on AIX? If so, where is that documented?

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PR Comment: https://git.openjdk.org/jdk/pull/16604#issuecomment-1894060171