Bug#33832: Release-critical Bugreport for February 28, 1999
> Package: libc6 (main)
> Maintainer: Joel Klecker and others <debian-glibc@lists.debian.org>
> 33832 libc6: dlopen problem. causes libraries to get opened about 4x (patch included)
I had a run-in with this problem some time ago, and I don't consider it a
bug in the shared library loader. The complaint is that it doesn't
normalize filenames, so it doesn't recognize when two different filenames
refer to the same file. The cases mentioned in the bug report could be
handled by recognizing /./ in filenames, however in general filename
normalization is a messy problem that the loader probably doesn't want to
get involved in. Perhaps it could index libraries by device id + inode,
I don't know.
At any rate, I don't think the loader logic should be changed right
before release, and not without consultation with the libc hackers (who
probably have a good reason for this behavior). This problem can be solved
easily in applications. Also, I don't believe it is a memory leak--I
suspect mmap knows the files are the same and reuses the same mapping at
a different memory location (as it does when the same file is mmap'ed
from different programs). Memory statistics can be misleading.
Andrew
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