wrong (?) order of initialization of so.

[Andrea]

Hi,

I would like to ask for help for a problem I have been having recently.
On RHEL 5 (and 4) I get the feeling the some .so in my projects are initialized in the wrong order.
This does not happen always, it depends on how many other .so are loaded.
It never happens in Fedora 19.

The whole project has many (~50) .so, but I seem to have tracked down the issue to 4 of them

A depends on B
B depends on C, D
C depends on D

these dependencies are used when linking and when I inspect the .so with readelf -d I can see
exactly these listed as DT_NEEDED (+ others 3rd party libraries)

Then doing LD_DEBUG=libs I can see that the order of initialization of these 4 is

D, B, then seg fault (as B really needs C to be initialized first).

When it works, the order is
D, C, B, A
(which is the only valid order as far as I can tell).

I am not too sure who decides this order (the kernel? gcc? ld? libc?).
Since it has never happened on Fedora 19, I am inclined to blame some old bug in RHEL 5
(running linux 2.6.18 and libc 2.5).

Does it ring a bell to anybody? How could I check I have not messed up things in the build process?
Does it exists a way to debug that?

Thank

Andrea