链接器如何查找动态库

How the dynamic linker looks up libraries

When the application starts, the dynamic linker looks at the DT_NEEDED field to find the required libraries. This field contains the soname of the library, so the next step is for the dynamic linker to walk through all the libraries in its search path looking for it.

This process conceptually involves two steps. Firstly the dynamic linker needs to search through all the libraries to find those that implement the given soname. Secondly the file names for the minor revisions need to be compared to find the latest version, which is then ready to be loaded.

We mentioned previously that there is a symbolic link setup by ldconfig between the library soname and the latest minor revision. Thus the dynamic linker should need to only follow that link to find the correct file to load, rather than having to open all possible libraries and decide which one to go with each time the application is required.

Since file system access is so slow, ldconfig also creates a cache of libraries installed in the system. This cache is simply a list of sonames of libraries available to the dynamic linker and a pointer to the major version link on disk, saving the dynamic linker having to read entire directories full of files to locate the correct link. You can analyse this with /sbin/ldconfig -p; it actually lives in the file /etc/ldconfig.so.cache. If the library is not found in the cache the dynamic linker will fall back to the slower option of walking the file system, thus it is important to re-run ldconfig when new libraries are installed.

 

首先按照soname，查找文件名与想要找的soname相同的文件，如果soname为目标，则查到并导入；

如果没有以soname为文件名的动态库或链接，那就在所有的查找路径中查找并打开所有的动态库，查出与目标库soname相同所有的动态库；

在这些动态库中，选择MinorVersion号最大的，载入。