I recently got to rebuild an Android NDK with a fresh toolchain again, and hit an interesting problem. I actually had hit it before, but only this time I fully analyzed what's going on. [As a side note, if you build such a NDK, don't use mpfr 3.1.0, as there is a bug in the libtool it ships]

Linking an application or a library pulls many things, that aren't part of the code being built. One of these many things is the libgcc static library. Part of libgcc consists in an implementation of the platform ABI. On Android systems, this means the ARM EABI. GCC, when compiling some instructions, will generate ABI calls. For example, integer divisions may call __aeabi_idiv.

Consider the following minimized real world scenario:

$ echo "int foo(int a) { return 42 % a; }" > foo.c
$ arm-linux-androideabi-gcc -o libfoo.so -shared foo.c -mandroid

GCC will emit a call to __aeabi_idivmod for the % operation. With GCC 4.6.3, this function is in _divsi3.o under libgcc.a. That function itself calls __aeabi_idiv0, which lives in _dvmd_lnx.o under libgcc.a.

When statically linking, ld will thus include foo.o, _divsi3.o and _dvmd_lnx.o, meaning it will include all functions from these object files. That is, foo, __divsi3, __aeabi_idiv, __aeabi_idivmod, __aeabi_idiv0 and __aeabi_ldiv0. And more than being included, these functions are exported, because symbol visibility in libgcc.a is default. So while we expect exporting foo from our library, we're actually exporting much more, including functions that just happened to be near the ones that our code (indirectly) uses.

Now, let's say we want to build another library, using that foo function from libfoo:

$ cat > bar.c <<EOF
extern int foo(int a);
long long bar(long long a) { return foo(a) % a; }
EOF
$ arm-linux-androideabi-gcc -o libbar.so -shared bar.c -mandroid

(The code above has absolutely no meaning, it just triggers the same function calls as what I was getting in the actual real world case)

When statically linking the above code, GCC will generate a call to __aeabi_ldivmod, which calls __aeabi_ldiv0, and many other things, directly or indirectly. When linking as above, nothing particularly nasty is going to happen. However, linking as above is actually wrong: the resulting library has an undefined reference to the foo symbol, and doesn't depend on libfoo. At runtime, if libfoo wasn't already loaded somehow, loading libbar would fail.

The proper way to link is the following:

$ arm-linux-androideabi-gcc -o libbar.so -shared bar.c -mandroid -L. -lfoo

A feature of ELF static linking is that when it resolves undefined symbols, the linker will choose to use the first occurrence of a symbol it finds in the various objects and libraries given on its command line. So with the command line above, for each __aeabi_* symbol, it will first look in libfoo if there isn't one. And while __aeabi_ldivmod is not in libfoo, __aeabi_ldiv0 is (see above).

So instead of including the code for __aeabi_ldiv0 from libgcc.a, it will call the copy from libfoo.

This wouldn't be so much of a problem if __aeabi_ldiv0 wasn't a weak symbol.

Enters faulty.lib. In the real world case, libfoo is loaded by the system dynamic linker, and libbar by faulty.lib. When resolving symbols for libbar, faulty.lib has to resolve libfoo symbols with the system linker, using dlsym(). On Android, dlsym() returns NULL for weak (defined) symbols, so faulty.lib can't resolve __aeabi_ldiv0.

The real world case wasn't a problem with GCC 4.4.3 from the vanilla Android NDK because in that GCC version, __aeabi_ldivmod doesn't call __aeabi_ldiv0.

This wouldn't happen if shared libraries wouldn't expose random platform ABI specific bits depending on what they use and depending on other symbols that happen to be in the same object files.

A similar issue happened a little while ago on Debian powerpc because a shared library was exporting ABI specific bits. Even worse, the toolchain was assuming the symbols would come from libgcc.a and generated wrong relocations for these symbols.

Update: Interestingly, the __aeabi_* symbols are hidden, in libgcc.a as provided on the Debian armel port.

2012-03-06 17:19:34+0900

faulty.lib, p.d.o, p.m.o

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