I am running into a problem with g++ 4.5.8 and the GNU extension to ELF for unique global symbols.

Take as example the function get_netdb_category() in boost/asio/impl/error.ipp.  The function has a static boost::asio::error::detail::netdb_category object that it returns a const reference to.  When I use nm to inspect the main executable the symbol appears in the data segment and the type for boost::asio::error::detail::netdb_category()::instance is "u", which indicates that the compiler has marked this as a globally-unique symbol.

The problem occurs when the loader loads the third-party shared library.  Because the symbol boost::asio::error::detail::netdb_category()::instance has been marked as unique in the shared library as well (verified by running readelf on the .so), the loader decides that it will simply use the one from the executable.  Because the shared library's version of the object is larger than the executable's version, when it is constructed it overwrites the 16 bytes beyond the end of the executable's object, trashing the contents of the data segment that were there previously.

I tried using the -fno-gnu-unique flag when compiling our executable, but that doesn't fix the problem - it marks the symbol as weak in the main executable, but the shared library, because I cannot re-compile, still has the symbol marked as unique.  I tried using dlopen with RTLD_LOCAL and that fixes the problem of overwriting the main executable's memory, however the corresponding symbols in the shared library have pointers back into the main executable's data segment (where the corresponding netdb_category static lives), which means that when if the shared library accesses these objects it will be following invalid pointers as it will overlay a larger v1.66 object onto a smaller v1.63 object.

Has anyone encountered a problem like this?  And, if so, did you find a good solution?

Much thanks,

Jamie