Tuesday, November 20, 2012

What is linux-gate.so.1?

Recently, was tracing some faults on a RHEL system and noticed that there is this "linux-gate.so.1" library that is pointed by many of the binaries.

# ldd /sbin/vxconfigd

linux-gate.so.1 => (0xffffe000)
libcrypt.so.1 => /lib/libcrypt.so.1 (0x0054e000)
libm.so.6 => /lib/tls/libm.so.6 (0x004de000)
libc.so.6 => /lib/tls/libc.so.6 (0x003aa000)
libdl.so.2 => /lib/libdl.so.2 (0x004d8000)
libvxscsi.so => /etc/vx/slib/libvxscsi.so (0xf7fcd000)
libpthread.so.0 => /lib/tls/libpthread.so.0 (0x00515000)
/lib/ld-linux.so.2 (0x00390000)

Seems that this is similar even on RHEL 4.2 and 4.6.
Asked Mr. Google and this URL turned up. [http://www.trilithium.com/johan/2005/08/linux-gate/]

In summary, this file is a virtual DSO, dynamically shared objected exposed by the kernel at a fixed address in every process memory.
If you want more details, check out the above link. :)

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