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Nix Packages collection & NixOS
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[feature request] can stub-ld load real dynamic linker based on an environment variable? #283087

Open yshui opened 10 months ago

yshui commented 10 months ago

Issue description

This is inspired by #195512

Some proprietary software don't like their binaries modified. There are some workarounds, some even include patching binary files (!). This doesn't feel sustainable.

For rpath/runpath, LD_LIBRARY_PATH should be able to replace them. But we still have to set the dynamic linker somehow. I tried running the program from the dynamic linker (ld.so program), but this results in /proc/self/exe pointing to ld.so instead of the program, which breaks programs that exec themselves.

So the only other solution (well, other than using an fhs env) I can think of is to have the nix stub-ld load the real ld.so. i.e. designate an environment variable such as NIX_LD_SO for storing the real ld.so, read that in the stub-ld and run it.

Not sure how doable this would be. There are some details of how dynamic linkers work I am unsure about.

yshui commented 10 months ago

urgh, someone already did that: https://github.com/Mic92/nix-ld

I feel this should become the default ld on nix.