[duped]

Use rpath and ship your dependencies. Even if you dlopen every shared library explicitly you have the same problem.

The glibc version problem is not new, you have never been able to rely (safely) that a version of glibc exists that works for your compiled program. This is an example of why containers exist, but unfortunately the problem isn't ELF - it's glibc!

And for that matter, glibc also ships the loader. This is the part that's mildly insane.

[sylware]

Yep, the issue is mostly the glibc but ELF does not help. Additionaly, the static libstdc++ is also an issue as it seems not "libdl-ing" any of its system dependencies (did not check if c++ gcc devs fixed that already).

That does not mean ELF is not overkill nowdays. In the case of dynamic linking, deprecating DT_NEEDED to rely on hardcoded (with probably specific relocations) and simplified dlopen/dlsym/dlclose in the ELF interpreter (that would deprecate tls_get_addr() as it would become redondant with dlsym) seems to be a sane cleanup: explicitely split dynamic linking from static linking.

Nowadays mitigation:game devs should go pure ELF64 (no main()) for their binaries and fully libdl-ized. The hard part is to fork a gcc static libstdc++ to libdl-ize its system dependencies (dunno if it was done).

[duped]

I think what you're advocating for is getting rid of automatic dynamic loading, which is certainly a take.

> go pure ELF64 (no main())

What does "pure" ELF64 even mean? No dependency on libc?

ELF is just an object file format. It doesn't imply anything about how the loader behaves or what features an ELF loader must have, or how that object relates to other ELF objects.

[sylware]

Yep, services from the libc would be libdl-ed too. You would have to decide: either you use the machine code in a shared object, or you would statically link that machine code, but the idea is to make those explicit and different, not that current mess.

It means using the sysv x86_64 ABI entry point (which is basically a main()...).

The file format alone is useless, you need the ELF and ABI specs to know how to use properly the information defined by this very file format.