Java Can 39;t Load Library Libawt_xawt.so

[Avenall Trejo]

Anative library is a library containing code compiled for a specific (native) architecture. There are certain scenarios like hardware-software integrations and process optimizations where using libraries written for different platforms can be very useful or even necessary. For this purpose, Java provides the Java Native Interface (JNI), which allows Java code that runs inside a Java Virtual Machine (JVM) to interoperate with applications and libraries written in other programming languages, such as C, C++, and assembly. The JNI enables Java code to call and be called by native applications and libraries written in other languages and it enables programmers to write native methods to handle situations where an application cannot be written entirely in Java [1].

Common native library formats include .dll files on Windows, .so files on Linux and .dylib files on macOS platforms. The conventional idiom for loading these libraries in Java is presented in the code example below.

Some commonly encountered situations where this error occurs include a reference to the ocijdbc10.dll and ocijdbc11.dll libraries when trying to connect to an Oracle 10g or 11g database with the OCI JDBC driver [3], as well as dependence on the lwjgl.dll library used in game development and Java applications relying on some core legacy C/C++ libraries [4].

An important thing to keep in mind is that System.loadLibrary() resolves library filenames in a platform-dependent way, e.g. the code snippet in the example in the Introduction would expect a file named someLibFile.dll on Windows, someLibFile.so on Linux, etc.

Another approach is to check whether the java.library.path system property is set and if it contains the path to the library. This can be done by calling System.getProperty("java.library.path") and verifying the content of the property, as shown in the code below.

Lastly, replacing System.loadLibrary() with a call to System.load() which takes the full library path as an argument is a solution that circumvents the java.library.path lookup and fixes the problem regardless of what the initial cause for throwing the UnsatisfiedLinkError error was.

Using native libraries compiled for different platforms is a common practice in Java, especially when working with large and feature- or performance-critical systems. The JNI framework enables Java to do this by acting as a bridge between Java code and native libraries written in other languages. One of the issues programmers run into is failure to load these native libraries in their Java code correctly, at which point the UnsatisfiedLinkError runtime error is being triggered by the JVM. This article provides insight into the origins of this error and explains relevant approaches for dealing with it.

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[4] User GustavXIII, 2012. UnsatisfiedLinkError: no lwjgl in java.library.path. JVM Gaming. [Online]. Available: -gaming.org/t/unsatisfiedlinkerror-no-lwjgl-in-java-library-path/37908. [Accessed Jan. 11, 2022]

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