Home Original page

Symbol versioning question with ld

Gordon.Schumacher@seagate.com Gordon.Schumacher@seagate.com
Wed Jun 13 22:48:00 GMT 2007 
Brian Dessent <brian@dessent.net> wrote on 06/13/2007 04:29:06 PM:

# I think you underestimate what all is involved with an ABI.  It's not
# just a matter of "link this symbol to this."  A function's arguments
# might have changed in type or in number; types might have different
# sizes, structs different layouts, and so on.  These aren't things that
# the linker has any control over, so in order to produce code that links
# to an older version of a library, you need the headers from that older
# version installed so that the compiler sees definitions that correspond
# to the symbols that the linker will use.  And there's no practical way
# to have multiple versions of the same header installed, thus you can
# only really link to whatever the library defines as the current version.

I'd not considered that; you're right.  :)

# It sounds like you're making it harder than it should be.  Just install
# an older distro under VMware.  (Or dual-boot with a separate partition,
# or whatever.)

It's unfortunately a little more complex than that - I at least need to
build my own compiler because the code in question requires a newer
version of GCC than would come with an old distro.  (I tried something
like this earlier...)

That does suggest that I was on the right track there, though.
More information about the Binutils mailing list