building a .so that is also an executable

Question

So everyone probably knows that glibc's /lib/libc.so.6 can be executed in the shell like a normal executable in which cases it prints its version information and exits. This is done via defining an entry point in the .so. For some cases it could be interesting to use this for other projects too. Unfortunately, the low-level entry point you can set by ld's -e option is a bit too low-level: the dynamic loader is not available so you cannot call any proper library functions. glibc for this reason implements the write() system call via a naked system call in this entry point.

My question now is, can anyone think of a nice way how one could bootstrap a full dynamic linker from that entry point so that one could access functions from other .so's?

Answer 1

Building your shared library with -pie option appears to give you everything you want:

/* pie.c */
#include <stdio.h>
int foo()
{
  printf("in %s %s:%d\n", __func__, __FILE__, __LINE__);
  return 42; 
}
int main() 
{ 
  printf("in %s %s:%d\n", __func__, __FILE__, __LINE__);
  return foo(); 
}


/* main.c */
#include <stdio.h>

extern int foo(void);
int main() 
{ 
  printf("in %s %s:%d\n", __func__, __FILE__, __LINE__);
  return foo(); 
}


$ gcc -fPIC -pie -o pie.so pie.c -Wl,-E
$ gcc main.c ./pie.so


$ ./pie.so
in main pie.c:9
in foo pie.c:4
$ ./a.out
in main main.c:6
in foo pie.c:4
$

P.S. glibc implements write(3) via system call because it doesn't have anywhere else to call (it is the lowest level already). This has nothing to do with being able to execute libc.so.6.

Answer 2

I suppose you'd have your ld -e point to an entry point which would then use the dlopen() family of functions to find and bootstrap the rest of the dynamic linker. Of course you'd have to ensure that dlopen() itself was either statically linked or you might have to implement enough of your own linker stub to get at it (using system call interfaces such as mmap() just as libc itself is doing.

None of that sounds "nice" to me. In fact just the thought of reading the glibc sources (and the ld-linux source code, as one example) enough to assess the size of the job sounds pretty hoary to me. It might also be a portability nightmare. There may be major differences between how Linux implements ld-linux and how the linkages are done under OpenSolaris, FreeBSD, and so on. (I don't know).