Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 415551
Prelink Corrupts Binaries
Last modified: 2007-12-07 08:48:18 EST
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.
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.