Re: Undefined use of weak symbols in gnulib

[Florian Weimer]

* Andreas Schwab:

> On Apr 27 2021, Florian Weimer via Binutils wrote:
>
>> I think we can provide an libBrokenGnulib.so preload module which
>> defines pthread_mutexattr_gettype to zero (as an absolute address), so
>> there is a kludge to keep old binaries working, but this is really
>> something that must be fixed in gnulib.
>
> It is likely that the use of weak pthread symbols is not confined to
> gnulib.

True.

Here's a fairly representative test case, I think.

#include <pthread.h>
#include <stdio.h>

extern __typeof (pthread_key_create) __pthread_key_create __attribute__ 
((weak));
extern __typeof (pthread_once) pthread_once __attribute__ ((weak));

void
f1 (void)
{
  puts ("f1 called");
}

pthread_once_t once_var;

void __attribute__ ((weak))
f2 (void)
{
  if (__pthread_key_create != NULL)
    pthread_once (&once_var, f1);
}

int
main (void)
{
  f2 ();
}

Building it with “gcc -O2 -fpie -pie” and linking with binutils 2.30
does not result in a crash with LD_PRELOAD=libpthread.so.0.  That's
because the call-to-address-zero via pthread_once has been stubbed out
with NOPs, I think.  This is still not correct and will undoubtedly
cause problems because pthread_once is usually called for its side
effect.

With binutils 2.35, the call-to-address-zero is not stubbed out anymore,
but there is still no dynamic symbol reference for pthread_once, so
there is a crash when running with LD_PRELOAD=libpthread.so.0.

This looks like a pre-existing toolchain issue on POWER, related to the
thread I quoted at the start.  If we proceed with the glibc libpthread
changes as planned, things might turn out unacceptably bad.

I did a quick experiment and we cannot work around this using a
libpthread.so stub library and compatibility-only symbols in libc.so.6.
Unversioned weak symbols bind to the baseline symbol version, as they
probably should.  Even a __pthread_key_create@GLIBC_2.17 compatibility
symbol triggers this issue.  I have to think of something else to
salvage this.

Thanks,
Florian