is there plan to support 'linker namespace' in glib?

[Nicholas Miell]

On 3/11/19 5:50 AM, Florian Weimer wrote:
> * zhuao:
> 
>> I notice that android bionic support 'linker namespace':Â https://source.android.com/devices/architecture/vndk/linker-namespace
>> it provides additional isolation among software components.
>> it may also benefit some usage:Â 
>> Â - isolation prebuilt binaries with different toolchain (versioned glibc)
>> Â - it may also give us opportunity to use android binary (HAL) with glibc, by isolating glib and bionic world in different namespace
>>
>>
>> do you think the above approach is possible?
>> Â if yes, is it possible to add such feature to glibc?
> 
> There have been many discussions over the year.  The requirements are
> quite diverse: some people want group support as in the Solaris linker.
> Others want dlmopen with a shared malloc (and perhaps shared other
> libraries; our implementation currently shares only the dynamic linker
> and nothing else).  Again others want to load the same library multiple
> times, disregarding its soname.  Then there is a desire to have some
> sort of firewall between different linker namespaces, as a general
> framework, so that you can load the same soname multiple times, and
> still achieving consistent execution.
> 
> I think that anything that is fairly general and actually works is still
> a major research effort, in addition to the work that would be needed to
> implement it in the current dynamic linker.  While a lot of research has
> been done on modules and how to compose them in the 80s, a lot of that
> knowledge seems to have been lost or is simply not available to people
> working on C/C++ implementations today.
> 
> Thanks,
> Florian
> 

And some people would like direct binding, especially because this is
how Windows and Mac OS already work.