First, you should generally use -fPIC flag when building shared libraries. Not using it “works” on 32-bit Linux, but would fail on 64-bit one with an error similar to: /usr/bin/ld: /tmp/ccUUrz9c.o: relocation R_X86_64_32 against `.rodata’ can not be used when making a shared object; recompile with -fPIC Second, your program will work as you expect … Read more
I needed a solution to this because I have a scriptable system that has no filesystem (using blobs from a database) and needs to load binary plugins to support some scripts. This is the solution I came up with which works on FreeBSD but may not be portable. void *dlblob(const void *blob, size_t len) { … Read more
You can define an on-load function for a linux library using the .init mechanism. This is the same as specifying the load-time entry point for a binary (e.g. using something other than main as the entry point for a program). When linking using ld directly you use the: -init <function name> or if you’re using … Read more
Update 2: see Andrew G Morgan’s slightly more complicated solution which does work for any GLIBC (that solution is also used in libc.so.6 itself (since forever), which is why you can run it as ./libc.so.6 (it prints version info when invoked that way)). Update 1: this no longer works with newer GLIBC versions: ./a.out: error … Read more