Re: How to test if dlclose is a no-op?

[Thadeus Fleming <thadeus.j.fleming@gmail.com>]

I'm working on improving a system that makes some bad assumptions
about dynamic unloading. While I'm not fond of dynamic unloading, I
think it might be valuable to be able to distinguish between "this C
library doesn't support unloading at all" and "if the planets are all
aligned, unloading might work." Testing if dlclose is a no-op would
allow me to make that distinction.


On Thu, Mar 15, 2018 at 9:40 AM, Rich Felker <dalias@libc.org> wrote:
> On Thu, Mar 15, 2018 at 08:32:34AM -0500, Thadeus Fleming wrote:
>> In the spirit of not “assum[ing] a certain implementation has
>> particular properties rather than testing,” how can one test if
>> dlclose is a no-op, as it is in musl, without breaking things if it
>> isn’t?
>
> This sounds like an XY problem¹. Do you care about whether you can
> recover virtual memory space, whether the underlying fs objects remain
> referenced, whether there's a cycle of dtors and ctors running, or
> something else?
>
> FYI there is no clear answer to the question even on other
> implementations. glibc only sometimes unloads; there are corner cases
> and race-type conditions where unloading is impossible for them. You
> really should not be designing around an assumption/requirement that
> anything get unloaded.
>
> Rich
>
>
>
> ¹ http://xyproblem.info/