Determining binary compatibility under linux

Question

What is the best way to determine a pre-compiled binary's dependencies (specifically in regards to glibc and libstdc++ symbols & versions) and then ensure that a target system has these installed?

I have a limitation in that I cannot provide source code to compile on each machine (employer restriction) so the defacto response of "compile on each machine to ensure compatibility" is not suitable. I also don't wish to provide statically compiled binaries -> seems very much a case of using a hammer to open an egg.

I have considered a number of approaches which loosely center around determining the symbols/libraries my executable/library requires through use of commands such as ldd -v </path/executable> or objdump -x </path/executable> | grep UND and then somehow running a command on the target system to check if such symbols, libraries and versions are provided (not entirely certain how I do this step?). This would then be followed by some pattern or symbol matching to ensure the correct versions, or greater, are present.

That said, I feel like this will already have been largely done for me and I'm suffering from ... "a knowledge gap ?" of how it is currently implemented.

Any thoughts/suggestions on how to proceed?

I should add that this is for the purposes of installing my software on a wide variety of linux distributions - in particular customised clusters - which may not obey distribution guidelines or standardised packaging methods. The objective being a seamless install.

I wish to accomplish binary compatibility at install time, not at a subsequent runtime, which may occur by a user with insufficient privileges to install dependencies.

Also, as I don't have source code access to all the third party libraries I use and install (specialised maths/engineering libraries) then an in-code solution does not work so well. I suppose I could write a binary that tests whether certain symbols (&versions) are present, but this binary itself would have compatibility issues to run.

I think my solution has to be to compile against older libraries (as mentioned) and install this as well as using the LSB checker (looks promising).

Answer 1

GNU libraries (glibc and libstdc++) support a mechanism called symbol versioning. First of all, these libraries export special symbols used by dynamic linker to resolve the appropriate symbol version (CXXABI_* and GLIBCXX_* in libstdc++, GLIBC_* in glibc). A simple script to the tune of:

nm -D libc.so.6 | grep " A "

will return a list of version symbols which can then be further shell processed to establish the maximum supported libc interface version (same works for libstdc++). From a C code, one has the option to do the same using dlvsym() (first dlopen() the library, then check whether certain minimal version of the symbols you need can be looked up using dlvsym()).

Other options for obtaining a glibc version in runtime include gnu_get_libc_version() and confstr() library calls.

However, the proper use of versioning interface is to write code which explicitly links to a specific glibc/libstdc++ library version. For example, code linking to GLIBC_2.10 interface version is expected to work with any glibc version newer than 2.10 (all versions up to 2.18 and beyond). While it is possible to enable versioning on a per symbol basis (using a ".symver" assembler/linker directive) the more reasonable approach is to set up a chroot environment using older (minimal supported) version of the toolchain and compile the project against it (it will seamlessly run with whatever newer version encountered).

Answer 2

Use Linux Application Checker tool ([1], [2], [3]) to check binary compatibility of your application with various Linux distributions. You can also check compatibility with your custom distribution by this tool.