Undefined Symbol When Running Proxychains

Last Firday, when I upgrade proxychains from 4.8.1 to 4.9 in my archlinux, it suddenly cannot work anymore.

When I run proxychains ls, it print out

[proxychains] config file found: /etc/proxychains.conf
[proxychains] preloading /usr/lib/libproxychains4.so
ls: symbol lookup error: /usr/lib/libproxychains4.so: undefined symbol: pthread_once

It is clearly that libproxychains4.so does not link against pthread.

Then I googled this error, finally I found this https://github.com/rofl0r/proxychains-ng/issues/53#issuecomment-107180938 on github.

It seems that jackyzy823 solved this issuse by changing
$(CC) -shared -lpthread $(LIBDL) $(LDFLAGS) $(LD_SET_SONAME)$(LDSO_PATHNAME) -o $@ $(LOBJS)
to
$(CC) -shared $(LDFLAGS) $(LD_SET_SONAME)$(LDSO_PATHNAME) -lpthread $(LIBDL) -o $@ $(LOBJS),
also it is introduced in commit fix makefile link order.

I tried to revert it, and everything works fine now.

I posted in this issue above, and got replay from the owner rofl0r

@proudzhu try to revert e79e05a as well. does that work ? this commit seems to be the original cause of the regression

Finally I found that I have “–as-needed” in my local LDFLAGS, it is set in the default makepkg.conf which will be loaded when building a package in archlinux.

Then I found this wiki, in section “Fixing problems with –as-needed”, it says “libraries don’t create problems, because they are allowed to have undefined symbols”.

So in my system, when building a shared library, every -llibs after $(LDFLAGS) will be ignored, so
$(CC) -shared -lpthread $(LIBDL) $(LDFLAGS) $(LD_SET_SONAME)$(LDSO_PATHNAME) -o $@ $(LOBJS) works,
but $(CC) -shared $(LDFLAGS) $(LD_SET_SONAME)$(LDSO_PATHNAME) -lpthread $(LIBDL) -o $@ $(LOBJS) fails.

Maybe we should move “-lpthread $(LIBDL)” before $(LDFLAGS).

But I cannot figure out why the other users in the post failed to link against libpthread. If it is a gcc link order issue as @jackyzy823 says ( but I’m confused as there is not other library in the argument), maybe we could change to
$(CC) -shared $(LD_SET_SONAME)$(LDSO_PATHNAME) -lpthread $(LIBDL) $(LDFLAGS) -o $@ $(LOBJS)?

Think in more depth, it is also related with the structure of proxychains. The program proxychains does not link against libproxychains4.so, it just load the library and do the other things.

Conclusion: Remember to add -llibs before $(LDFLAGS) when building shared libraries.