Bugzilla Bug 13878

This bug is also being tracked in the forums at:
  http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic.php?t=29816

prelink-20021002-r1, (`prelink --version` reads 1.0) and the lastest packages in
the Portage tree as of today, January 13 reports the following when attempting
to prelink any file:

# prelink -a
prelink: dso.c:306: fdopen_dso: Assertion `j == k' failed.
Aborted

This happens on my laptop which was purchased two weeks ago, my desktop which
has been fully upgraded over time from Gentoo 1.0_rc6 back in the day, and a
server which is about three weeks old.

This problem is due to a UPX-compressed executable in a directory that is being 
prelinked. jakub@redhat.com, the prelink author, has been informed of this 
matter. 

Consider adding such a notice to the Gentoo prelink guide. 

OOh, many thanks I would have never found this one out.
Will add it to the howto asap.
Many thanks for the info.

Stefan

I'm not sure about that...
I'm getting that bug and I don't have UPX installed at all.
Here's an example which fails with that error:
  prelink -vmR /usr/bin/ls

Something tells me it might be more fundamental than that.  Do you think 'ls' could possibly linked to a UPX compressed executable?

It's probably just a matter that prelink doesn't recognize the executable
format and handles it less than gracefully. I would suggest running `emerge
strace`, running `strace -o prelink.log prelink -vmR /usr/bin/ls`, and
attaching the resultant prelink.log. This should help find the exact failure
condition(s).

Okay, the trace gave away the problem.  It failed to understand the binary from
my antivirus client, which is distributed in binary only format.  When I masked
it (by masking /usr/local/bin), prelink started to work!

Perhaps something should be written about using strace to identify exactly what
file is causing a problem?

It's in the howto (about the UPX exe)
Closing