#elf #dlopen #loader

no-std dlopen-rs

A safe and efficient Rust implementation of dynamic library loading

13 releases (6 breaking)

new 0.7.0 Feb 16, 2025
0.5.0 Dec 9, 2024
0.4.0 Nov 17, 2024
0.1.0 Jul 25, 2024

#221 in Operating systems

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220 downloads per month

Apache-2.0

81KB
2K SLoC

license

dlopen-rs

English | 中文

[Documentation]

A Rust library that implements a series of interfaces such as dlopen and dlsym, consistent with the behavior of libc, providing robust support for dynamic library loading and symbol resolution.

This library serves four purposes:

  1. Provides a dynamic linker written purely in Rust.
  2. Provide loading ELF dynamic libraries support for #![no_std] targets.
  3. Easily swap out symbols in shared libraries with your own custom symbols at runtime
  4. Faster than ld.so in most cases (loading dynamic libraries and getting symbols)

Currently, it supports x86_64, RV64, and AArch64 architectures.

Feature

Feature Default Description
std Yes Enable std
debug No Enable this to use gdb/lldb for debugging loaded dynamic libraries. Note that only dynamic libraries loaded using dlopen-rs can be debugged with gdb.
mmap Yes Enable default implementation on platforms with mmap
version No Activate specific versions of symbols for dynamic library loading
tls Yes Enable this to use thread local storage.
unwinding No Enable this to use the exception handling mechanism provided by dlopen-rs.
libgcc Yes Enable this if the program uses libgcc to handle exceptions.
libunwind No Enable this if the program uses libunwind to handle exceptions.

Examples

Example 1

The dlopen interface is used to load dynamic libraries. The dlopen in dlopen-rs behaves consistently with the dlopen in libc. Additionally, this library uses the log crate, and you can use your preferred logging library to output logs to observe the working process of dlopen-rs. In the examples of this library, the env_logger crate is used for logging.

use dlopen_rs::ELFLibrary;
use std::path::Path;

fn main() {
    std::env::set_var("RUST_LOG", "trace");
    env_logger::init();
    dlopen_rs::init();
    let path = Path::new("./target/release/libexample.so");
    let libexample =
        ElfLibrary::dlopen(path, OpenFlags::RTLD_LOCAL | OpenFlags::RTLD_LAZY).unwrap();
    let add = unsafe { libexample.get::<fn(i32, i32) -> i32>("add").unwrap() };
    println!("{}", add(1, 1));

    let print = unsafe { libexample.get::<fn(&str)>("print").unwrap() };
    print("dlopen-rs: hello world");
}

Example 2

Use LD_PRELOAD to replace the dlopen and other functions in libc with the implementations provided by this library.

# Compile the library into a dynamic library format
cargo build -r -p cdylib

# Compile the test case
cargo build -r -p dlopen-rs --example preload

# Use the implementation from this library to replace the implementation in libc
RUST_LOG=trace LD_PRELOAD=./target/release/libdlopen.so ./target/release/examples/preload

Example 3

Fine-grained control of the load flow of the dynamic library, you can replace certain functions in the dynamic library that need to be relocated with your own implementation. In the following example, we replace malloc with mymalloc in the dynamic library and turn on lazy binding.

use dlopen_rs::ELFLibrary;
use libc::size_t;
use std::{ffi::c_void, path::Path};

extern "C" fn mymalloc(size: size_t) -> *mut c_void {
    println!("malloc:{}bytes", size);
    unsafe { libc::malloc(size) }
}

fn main() {
    std::env::set_var("RUST_LOG", "debug");
    env_logger::init();
    dlopen_rs::init();
    let path = Path::new("./target/release/libexample.so");
    let libc = ElfLibrary::load_existing("libc.so.6").unwrap();
    let libgcc = ElfLibrary::load_existing("libgcc_s.so.1").unwrap();

    let libexample = ElfLibrary::from_file(path, OpenFlags::CUSTOM_NOT_REGISTER)
        .unwrap()
        .relocate_with(&[libc, libgcc], &|name: &str| {
            if name == "malloc" {
                return Some(mymalloc as _);
            } else {
                return None;
            }
        })
        .unwrap();

    let add = unsafe { libexample.get::<fn(i32, i32) -> i32>("add").unwrap() };
    println!("{}", add(1, 1));

    let print = unsafe { libexample.get::<fn(&str)>("print").unwrap() };
    print("dlopen-rs: hello world");
}

TODO

  • dladdr and dlinfo have not been implemented yet. dlerror currently only returns NULL.
  • RTLD_NEXT for dlsym has not been implemented.
  • When dlopen fails, the newly loaded dynamic library is destroyed, but the functions in .fini are not called.
  • It is unclear whether there is a way to support more relocation types.
  • There is a lack of correctness and performance testing under high-concurrency multithreading scenarios.
  • More tests.

Supplement

If you encounter any issues during use, feel free to raise them on GitHub. We warmly welcome everyone to contribute code to help improve the functionality of dlopen-rs. 😊

Dependencies

~2–3.5MB
~69K SLoC