J9.6 Installing Problem on Debian 13

[Tony Poole]

I've recently upgraded one of my systems to Debian 13.  When I try to install J9.6 on it, I get the following error:

Load library /home/tony/j9.6/bin/libj.so failed: /home/tony/j9.6/bin/libj.so: cannot enable executable stack as shared object requires: Invalid argument

This is in response to execution of jconsole.sh.  The same installation media works fine on a Debian 12 system.  

The explanation I found for this is:

The "cannot enable executable stack as shared object requires: Invalid argument" error on Debian 13 usually occurs when a program or shared library attempts to execute code on the stack, which is restricted by modern Linux security features like Exec-Shield. Debian 13, like other recent distributions, enforces this by default to prevent stack smashing attacks. 

[Norman Drinkwater]

This issue is fixed in 9.6.4, which should be released soon.

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[Tony Poole]

Got it.  Thanks.

[Remington Furman]

In the meantime you can modify the console.sh script to tell glibc not to care about the executable stack.  Or export it as an environment variable.

#!/bin/bash
GLIBC_TUNABLES=glibc.rtld.execstack=2 $(dirname "$0")/bin/jconsole "$@"

It's a result of this commit to glibc:
https://sourceware.org/git/?p=glibc.git;a=commit;h=12a497c716f0a06be5946cabb8c3ec22a079771e

Docs:
https://sourceware.org/glibc/manual/2.42/html_node/Dynamic-Linking-Tunables.html#index-glibc_002ertld_002eexecstack

This bit a few different projects, and I think I learned of this workaround from the Julia forum here:
https://github.com/JuliaLang/julia/issues/57250#issuecomment-2834911167

-Remington

[Remington Furman]

Correction: it was this commit that caused dlopen() to fail when loading a shared library that wants to execute from the stack when the calling program isn't already configured to do so.
https://sourceware.org/git/?p=glibc.git;a=commit;h=0ca8785a28

The commit I linked to earlier gave users the option to revert to the old behavior.

-Remington

[Tony Poole]

Thanks for the workaround.  I'm in business now!  Also, thanks for links to details on the broader issue here.

Take care and be well.