[dpdk-dev] [PATCH] eal: don't use default library path for static binaries

[Bruce Richardson <bruce.richardson@intel.com>]

When using statically linked DPDK binaries, the EAL checks the default PMD
path and tries to load any drivers there, despite the fact that all drivers
are normally linked into the binary.  This behaviour can cause issues if
the PMD path and lib dir is configured to a non-standard location which is
not in the ld.so.conf paths, e.g. a build with prefix set to a home
directory location. In a case such as this, EAL will try and
(unnecessarily) load the .so driver files but that load will fail as their
dependent libraries, such as ethdev, for example, will not be found.

Because of this, it is better if statically linked DPDK apps do not load
drivers from the standard paths automatically. The user can always have
this behaviour by explicitly specifying the path using -d flag, if so
desired.

Not loading the libraries automatically can also prevent potential issues
with a user building and running a statically-linked DPDK binary based off
a private copy of DPDK, while there exists on the same machine a
system-wide installation of DPDK in the default locations. Without this
change, the system-installed drivers will be loaded to the binary alongside
the statically-linked drivers, which is not what the user would have
intended.

To detect whether we are in a statically or dynamically linked binary, we
can have EAL try to get a dlopen handle to its own shared library, by
calling dlopen with the RTLD_NOLOAD flag. This will return NULL if there is
no such shared lib loaded i.e. the code is executing from a static library,
or a handle to the lib if it is loaded.

Signed-off-by: Bruce Richardson <bruce.richardson@intel.com>
---
 lib/librte_eal/common/eal_common_options.c | 11 +++++++++--
 1 file changed, 9 insertions(+), 2 deletions(-)

diff --git a/lib/librte_eal/common/eal_common_options.c b/lib/librte_eal/common/eal_common_options.c
index 0901b493c..1d958d11e 100644
--- a/lib/librte_eal/common/eal_common_options.c
+++ b/lib/librte_eal/common/eal_common_options.c
@@ -447,8 +447,15 @@ eal_plugins_init(void)
 	struct shared_driver *solib = NULL;
 	struct stat sb;
 
-	if (*default_solib_dir != '\0' && stat(default_solib_dir, &sb) == 0 &&
-				S_ISDIR(sb.st_mode))
+	/* if we are not statically linked, add default driver loading
+	 * path if it exists as a directory.
+	 * (Using dlopen with NOLOAD flag on eal, will return NULL if the eal
+	 * shared library is not already loaded i.e. it's statically linked.)
+	 */
+	if (dlopen("librte_eal.so", RTLD_LAZY | RTLD_NOLOAD) != NULL &&
+			*default_solib_dir != '\0' &&
+			stat(default_solib_dir, &sb) == 0 &&
+			S_ISDIR(sb.st_mode))
 		eal_plugin_add(default_solib_dir);
 
 	TAILQ_FOREACH(solib, &solib_list, next) {
-- 
2.25.1