[FFmpeg-devel] Memory leak using bitstream filters with shared libs

[Uoti Urpala]

On Sun, 2008-03-09 at 04:25 +0100, Michael Niedermayer wrote:
> On Sun, Mar 09, 2008 at 04:48:11AM +0200, Uoti Urpala wrote:
> > On Sat, 2008-03-08 at 19:23 -0500, Rich Felker wrote:
> > > It's actually an implementation bug since the C language requires that
> > > the addresses match. I suspect it's binutils doing something stupid
> > > due to -Bsymbolic. Anyway this sort of problem is common enough that
> > 
> > It's binutils doing what -Bsymbolic is documented to do - binding
> > references to global symbols to the definition within the shared
> > library. If the main program is compiled without -fPIC then functions
> > are normally bound to the main program's PLT entry (if one exists for
> > the function in question), and that's what other code will use.
> 
> "binding references to global symbols to the definition within the shared
> library" is one thing and thats fine. The bug is that the references from
> outside the shared lib bind to something else.

The "bug" is that references in different places bind to different
targets. You can't say that changing references in one place to point to
a different target is "fine" if you also care about all references being
in sync.

> Its not allowed by the c
> standard as others have already said and not documented as side effect
> of -Bsymbolic.

If you want behavior as closely matching the C standard as possible then
don't use -Bsymbolic. There's not much else it could do - you can't both
change reference targets in one place AND keep them in sync with other
places! Any attempt to make -Bsymbolic also change the addresses seen by
a non-PIC main program would need to involve things like adding
relocations to be done at runtime to the main program code with values
depending on shared library contents...

The (at least somewhat) practical alternatives I can think of are:
1. Accept that addresses inside and outside the library will not match
2. Stop using -Bsymbolic (you can still use visibility to bind
non-public symbols inside the library)
3. Compile everything with -fPIC, even the program using the library