Lazy binding

Lazy binding (also known as lazy linking or on-demand symbol resolution) is the process by which symbol resolution isn't done until a symbol is actually used. Functions can be bound on-demand, but data references can't.

All dynamically resolved functions are called via a Procedure Linkage Table (PLT) stub. A PLT stub uses relative addressing, using the Global Offset Table (GOT) to retrieve the offset. The PLT knows where the GOT is, and uses the offset to this table (determined at program linking time) to read the destination function's address and make a jump to it.

To be able to do that, the GOT must be populated with the appropriate addresses. Lazy binding is implemented by providing some stub code that gets called the first time a function call to a lazy-resolved symbol is made. This stub is responsible for setting up the necessary information for a binding function that the runtime linker provides. The stub code then jumps to it.

The binding function sets up the arguments for the resolving function, calls it, and then jumps to the address returned from resolving function. The next time that user code calls this function, the PLT stub jumps directly to the resolved address, since the resolved value is now in the GOT. (GOT is initially populated with the address of this special stub; the runtime linker does only a simple relocation for the load base.)

The semantics of lazy-bound (on-demand) and now-bound (at load time) programs are the same:

Lazy binding is controlled by the -z option to the linker, ld. This option takes keywords as an argument; the keywords include (among others):

lazy
When generating an executable or shared library, mark it to tell the runtime linker to defer function-call resolution to the point when the function is called (lazy binding), rather than at load time.
now
When generating an executable or shared library, mark it to tell the runtime linker to resolve all symbols when the program is started, or when the shared library is linked to using dlopen(), instead of deferring function-call resolution to the point when the function is first called.

Lazy binding is the default. If you're using qcc (as we recommend), use the -W option to pass the -z option to ld. For example, specify -Wl,-zlazy or -Wl,-znow.

There are cases where the default lazy binding isn't desired. For example:

There's a way to do each of these:

To see if a binary was built with -znow, use the appropriate variant of readelf. For example:

ntox86-readelf -d my_binary

The output includes the BIND_NOW dynamic tag if -znow was used when linking.

You can use the DL_DEBUG environment variable to get the runtime linker to display some debugging information. For more information, see "Diagnostics and debugging" and "Environment variables," later in this chapter.

Applications with many symbols—typically C++ applications—benefit the most from lazy binding. For many C applications, the difference is negligible.

Lazy binding does introduce some overhead; it takes longer to resolve N symbols using lazy binding than with immediate resolution. There are two aspects that potentially save time or at least improve the user's perception of system performance:

Both of the above are typically true for C++ applications.

Lazy binding could affect realtime performance because there's a delay the first time you access each unresolved symbol, but this delay isn't likely to be significant, especially on fast machines. If this delay is a problem, use -znow

Note: It isn't sufficient to use -znow on the shared object that has a function definition for handling something critical; the whole process must be resolved "now". For example, you should probably link driver executables with -znow or run drivers with LD_BIND_NOW.