This is a particularly serious issue for auditor-based tools that need to interface with binaries within the application namespace. Tools often need to make calls to a library immediately when it is loaded before application code starts to use the library. It is not safe to call into the library prior to its init constructors and the auditor interface does not provide a callback after init constructors have run, thus the only alternative is to "promote" the init constructors through a recursive call to dl*open during la_activity(CONSISTENT).

This bug makes this approach unstable in practice. For instance, in HPCToolkit as part of initialization we call into libcuda.so to set up callbacks for monitoring CUDA operations. We call dlopen/dlsym to access the libcuda.so API without creating a direct dependency (to prevent loading libcuda.so for non-CUDA applications). Some application frameworks initiate CUDA operations during their init constructors, to allow us to capture these operations we initialize when libcuda.so is loaded (if we have not already done so to capture other operations of interest, such as thread creation). If the first action by an application framework's init constructor is a dlopen(libcuda.so) (seen in IBM’s XL OpenMP runtime when used by Clang at LLNL for OpenMP offloading), we initialize during this call and recursively dlopen(libcuda.so), and subsequently crash due to this bug.


Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. tar xvzf recursive-dlopen-crashes.tar.gz
2. cd recursive-dlopen-crashes
3. make
Actual Results:  
<snip> 
Outer dlopen(libinit), inner dlopen(libinit):
LD_AUDIT=./auditor.so ./main
[main] Dlopening libinit...
[audit] libinit has been loaded (but not initialized)
[audit] First CONSISTENT with libinit, dlopening libinit...
Inconsistency detected by ld.so: dl-open.c: 627: dl_open_worker_begin: Assertion `r_state == RT_CONSISTENT' failed!
make: [Makefile:19: test] Error 127 (ignored)

Outer dlopen(libwrap), inner dlopen(libwrap):
LD_AUDIT=./auditor-wrap.so ./main-wrap
[main] Dlopening libwrap...
[audit] libinit has been loaded (but not initialized)
[audit] First CONSISTENT with libinit, dlopening libwrap...
Inconsistency detected by ld.so: dl-open.c: 627: dl_open_worker_begin: Assertion `r_state == RT_CONSISTENT' failed!
make: [Makefile:22: test] Error 127 (ignored)


Expected Results:  
no asserts

The problem also affects RHEL9 and this problem was reported a long time ago along with other auditor problems that were fixed in 2.35 but this particular issue was never addressed. Although I didn't specifically test it there, it is fairly likely that upstream glibc is also affected.