Bug 415551

Summary:	Prelink Corrupts Binaries
Product:	[Fedora] Fedora	Reporter:	Chris Spencer <chrisspen>
Component:	prelink	Assignee:	Jakub Jelinek <jakub>
Status:	CLOSED NOTABUG	QA Contact:	Fedora Extras Quality Assurance <extras-qa>
Severity:	high	Docs Contact:
Priority:	low
Version:	8
Target Milestone:	---
Target Release:	---
Hardware:	All
OS:	Linux
Whiteboard:
Fixed In Version:		Doc Type:	Bug Fix
Doc Text:		Story Points:	---
Clone Of:		Environment:
Last Closed:	2007-12-07 13:48:18 UTC	Type:	---
Regression:	---	Mount Type:	---
Documentation:	---	CRM:
Verified Versions:		Category:	---
oVirt Team:	---	RHEL 7.3 requirements from Atomic Host:
Cloudforms Team:	---	Target Upstream Version:
Embargoed:

Description Chris Spencer 2007-12-07 12:34:52 UTC

Description of problem:
Prelink strips data from some binaries, making them unusable.

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Install Bitpim (http://www.bitpim.org) or Neko (http://www.nekovm.org)
2. Run prelink.
3. Run "bitpim" or "nekotools server". Notice they return an error because data
has been stripped from these binaries.
4. yum uninstall prelink
5. reinstall bitpim or neko
6. Rerun "bitpim" or "nekotools server". Notice they run as expected.
  
Actual results:
Prelink strips data from some binaries.

Expected results:
Prelink should not strip data from any binaries.

Additional info:
Removing prelink from my system fixed the problem. However, determining prelink
to be the culprit was not immediately evident and caused much frustration. If
prelink is not designed to corrupt binaries in this way, then it should be
fixed, or at least not installed by default.

Comment 1 Jakub Jelinek 2007-12-07 13:48:18 UTC

If they concatenate ELF binaries (or shared libraries) with arbitrary data after
it, without putting that at least into unallocated sections, then they are
terminally broken.  From a quick check of the bitpim binary in the i386.rpm on
their website that's what they are doing.
You can work around their bugs by adding /etc/prelink.conf.d/bitpim.conf
etc. snippets which will blacklist those binaries, but really the apps should be
fixed not to do this.  Please report it to them and let them fix this.