[ovs-dev] [PATCH v2] openvswitch: Use libtool and allow building shared libs

[Helmut Schaa]

Ben Pfaff <blp at nicira.com> schrieb:
>On Mon, Dec 09, 2013 at 10:32:06AM +0100, Helmut Schaa wrote:
>> Currently openvswitch builds all libraries static only. However,
>> libopenvswitch is linked into nearly all openvswitch executables
>> making it hardly possible to run openvswitch on embedded devices
>> (for example running OpenWrt).
>> 
>> Convert openvswitch to use libtool for building its internal libs.
>> This allows "--enable-shared" and "--enable-static" as configure
>> arguments. Default is "--disable-shared" thus keeping the current
>> behavior with the only change that static libs are installed by
>> "make install".
>> 
>> Since the openvswitch library interfaces are internal and thus not
>> stable (yet) encode the openvswitch version into the library name:
>> libopenvswitch-2.0.90.so
>
>...
>
>> Signed-off-by: Helmut Schaa <helmut.schaa at googlemail.com>
>
>I'm inclined to apply this, but a few potential issues come to mind.
>
>The Red Hat packaging tends to complain when new files get installed:
>it has a whitelist of files that are supposed to be installed.  So,
>did you check whether the RHEL packaging still works?
>
>The OVS tree has a couple of features that use linker tricks.  You can
>find these in the Makefiles and code by searching for
>USE_LINKER_SECTIONS.  I suspect that these will break in a shared
>library environment.  There are fallbacks that do not use linker
>tricks, but I'm not sure that the fallbacks will be much better.  Do
>you have any thoughts about what to do?  (If it's not obvious what
>these features intend to do, then please ask and I will explain.)

Thanks for the comments. I'll look into this tomorrow ...

Helmut