The linux-gate.so.1 file from Lab 1

[Hilde Bell]

Hello,

linux-gate.so.1 is one of the files that ldd bash command returned. Don't go looking for it to try to put it in your lib directory.

I found this after googling for it:

What is linux-gate.so.1?

When you use the ldd utility on a reasonably recent Linux system you'll frequently see a reference to an ethereal entity known as linux-gate.so.1:

ldd /bin/sh
linux-gate.so.1 => (0xffffe000)
libdl.so.2 => /lib/libdl.so.2 (0xb7fb2000)
libc.so.6 => /lib/libc.so.6 (0xb7e7c000)
/lib/ld-linux.so.2 (0xb7fba000)


What's so strange about that? It's just a dynamically loaded library, right?

Sort of, for sufficiently generous definitions of dynamically loaded library. The lack of file name in the output indicates that ldd was unable to locate a file by that name. Indeed, any attempt to find the corresponding file – whether manually or by software designed to automatically load and analyze such libraries – will be unsuccessful.

From time to time this is a cause of befuddlement and frustration for users as they go searching for a non-existent system file. You can confidently tell users on this futile quest that there's not supposed to be a linux-gate.so.1 file present anywhere on the file system; it's a virtual DSO, a shared object exposed by the kernel at a fixed address in every process' memory.