I'm trying to learn more about library versioning in Linux and how to put it all to work. Here's the context:

I have two versions of a dynamic library which expose the same set of interfaces, say libsome1.so and libsome2.so. An application is linked against libsome1.so.

This application uses libdl.so to dynamically load another module, say libmagic.so. Now libmagic.so is linked against libsome2.so. Obviously, without using linker scripts to hide symbols in libmagic.so, at run-time all calls to interfaces in libsome2.so are resolved to libsome1.so. This can be confirmed by checking the value returned by libVersion() against the value of the macro LIB_VERSION.

So I try next to compile and link libmagic.so with a linker script which hides all symbols except 3 which are defined in libmagic.so and are exported by it. This works... Or at least libVersion() and LIB_VERSION values match (and it reports version 2 not 1).

However, when some data structures are serialized to disk, I noticed some corruption. In the application's directory if I delete libsome1.so and create a soft link in its place to point to libsome2.so, everything works as expected and the same corruption does not happen.

I can't help but think that this may be caused due to some conflict in the run-time linker's resolution of symbols. I've tried many things, like trying to link libsome2.so so that all symbols are alised to symbol@@VER_2 (which I am still confused about because the command nm -CD libsome2.so still lists symbols as symbol and not symbol@@VER_2), but nothing seems to work.

What am I doing wrong?