Solaris 10: Ack! Where did my archive libraries go?
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20060525 Thursday May 25, 2006

Solaris 10: Ack! Where did my archive libraries go?

In Solaris 10 all the archive libraries in the core OS have been removed. To access these functions, you have to use the shared libraries. Rod Evans wrote about this in his blog. The change grew out of the Process Model Unification project, which is decribed in this bug.

To be more specific, there is no problem with linking application archive libraries on Solaris 10.  We do it all the time int he products I work on. The change in Solaris 10 was that Solaris was no longer going to export Solaris functionality using archive libraries.  That's an interface decision that Sun made because it is easier for us to keep our interfaces stable, and to keep old programs working on a newer OS.

So in general there is no problem with the basic functionality of static linking. Go ahead and keep using it, but from a build dependency point of view, if the .a file encapsulates an interface to a runtime component, it's hard to make sure the statically linked code matches the version of the runtime component.  That's the problem we avoided in Solaris 10. (Read more about it in Rod's blog, linked above).

Posted by Chris Quenelle ( May 25 2006, 12:45:11 PM PDT ) - Permalink - -

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mug shot Chris Quenelle is a tools developer at Sun Microsystems. He's worked on performance and debugging tools at Sun for more than 10 years. He reads comic books and science fiction, and has more tivos than he can keep track of.

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