[Vm-dev] Unexpected external library dependencies on linux

[David T. Lewis]

On Thu, Apr 16, 2020 at 02:55:46PM -0700, tim Rowledge wrote:
> 
> > On 2020-04-16, at 2:42 PM, David T. Lewis <lewis at mail.msen.com> wrote:
> > 
> > 
> > On Thu, Apr 16, 2020 at 06:53:51PM +0200, Levente Uzonyi wrote:
> >> 
> >> However, recent VMs (202003050026 from March, 202004160240 from April) 
> >> also depend on the following:
> >> 
> >> libuuid.so.1
> >> libutil.so.1
> >> libpulse-simple.so.0
> >> libasound.so.2
> >> 
> >> The last two are the most worrying as servers usually don't need or have 
> >> sound installed. So, without pulseaudio installed, these VMs won't start.
> >> Does anyone know how and why those new dependencies got there?
> >> 
> >> (These are the dependencies of the VM binary itself not dependencies of 
> >> external plugins).
> > 
> > Hi Levente,
> > 
> > I don't know the answer to your question, but the sound dependencies are
> > likely associated with the VM plugin modules vm-sound-*.so as opposed to
> > any of the conventional VM plugins such as UUIDPlugin.so. It is quite
> > likely that specifying the -vm-sound-null parameter to the VM will bypass
> > any problems. Otherwise, deleting the offending vm-sound-* modules should
> > be harmless.
> 
> Is it possible some edit to the build files made the pulse audio stuff
> a default (this was discussed recently) and set it to link to the VM
> instead of the (expected to be) separate vm-sound-* module? 
>

Pulse audio /is/ one of the vm-sound-* modules, so the idea there was
just to put it first in the search list because that's what makes sense on
most Linux platforms today.

But I see now that Levente was asking about library dependencies in the
actual VM executable itself (which you can see with "$ ldd squeak" in the
libarary directory with the VM and plugins). It has dependencies on the
pulse audio and alsa sound libraries. That makes no sense at all, and I
don't know the reason for it.

I also see that the plugins have lots of unnecessary dependencies. For
example, the UUID plugin depends on pulse audio and alsa sound libraries,
which is obviously not right.

Dave