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Chapter 38. Linking Dynamically-Loaded Functions

Table of Contents
ULTRIX
DEC OSF/1
SunOS 4.x, Solaris 2.x and HP-UX

After you have created and registered a user-defined function, your work is essentially done. Postgres, however, must load the object code (e.g., a .o file, or a shared library) that implements your function. As previously mentioned, Postgres loads your code at runtime, as required. In order to allow your code to be dynamically loaded, you may have to compile and link-edit it in a special way. This section briefly describes how to perform the compilation and link-editing required before you can load your user-defined functions into a running Postgres server. Note that this process has changed as of Version 4.2.

Tip: The old Postgres dynamic loading mechanism required in-depth knowledge in terms of executable format, placement and alignment of executable instructions within memory, etc. on the part of the person writing the dynamic loader. Such loaders tended to be slow and buggy. As of Version 4.2, the Postgres dynamic loading mechanism has been rewritten to use the dynamic loading mechanism provided by the operating system. This approach is generally faster, more reliable and more portable than our previous dynamic loading mechanism. The reason for this is that nearly all modern versions of UNIX use a dynamic loading mechanism to implement shared libraries and must therefore provide a fast and reliable mechanism. On the other hand, the object file must be postprocessed a bit before it can be loaded into Postgres. We hope that the large increase in speed and reliability will make up for the slight decrease in convenience.

You should expect to read (and reread, and re-reread) the manual pages for the C compiler, cc(1), and the link editor, ld(1), if you have specific questions. In addition, the regression test suites in the directory PGROOT/src/regress contain several working examples of this process. If you copy what these tests do, you should not have any problems. The following terminology will be used below:

The following general restrictions and notes also apply to the discussion below:

ULTRIX

It is very easy to build dynamically-loaded object files under ULTRIX. ULTRIX does not have any shared library mechanism and hence does not place any restrictions on the dynamic loader interface. On the other hand, we had to (re)write a non-portable dynamic loader ourselves and could not use true shared libraries. Under ULTRIX, the only restriction is that you must produce each object file with the option -G 0. (Notice that that's the numeral ``0'' and not the letter ``O''). For example,

# simple ULTRIX example
% cc -G 0 -c foo.c
produces an object file called foo.o that can then be dynamically loaded into Postgres. No additional loading or link-editing must be performed.