Static binary, .so plugins that are static too - can it be done

[bert hubert]

Hi binutils people,

I hope this list is appropriate for what I'm asking.

I have a program that I want to distribute statically because I need
glibc-2.2 for its superior pthread_mutex_lock implementation. The target
computers run old versions of redhat.

The problem is that this program loads modules which are .so files, and that
those .so files are of course not 'static', and at least need ld-linux.so,
which might in itself be a problem.

Two questions:

	1) does a 'static shared library' even exist?
		It might be possible to have such a library link in
		everything statically?

	2) If I reduce the .so's dependencies to just ld-linux.so, which
	   would then come from an older glibc, would that work? The .so
	   would then not link in libc and libm, but 'get' the functions
	   from the static binary?

What I really want is a .a file that I can load at runtime :-)

It would be pretty hard to get the program away from its plugin
architecture, if this doesn't work out, I'm leaning towards distributing the
program in a chrooted glibc-2.2 environment :-(

Thanks for your time!

Regards,

bert

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