Android: Trying to load native library results in a process terminated by signal (11)

Symptoms

You are trying to load your native C/C++ library in an Android application and when at runtime your app calls the System.loadLibrary() function - for example:

static {
        System.loadLibrary("mynativelib");

}

the application dies without core dumping, and the only message you see in LogCat is something like the following:

01-23 19:58:08.699: D/dalvikvm(4146): Trying to load lib /data/data/com.example.myapp/lib/libmynativelib.so 0x42341a50
01-23 19:58:08.709: I/ActivityManager(340): Process com.example.myapp (pid 4146) has died.
01-23 19:58:08.709: W/ActivityManager(340): Force removing ActivityRecord{211d37d0 com.example.myapp/.MyActivity}: app died, no saved state
01-23 19:58:08.719: D/Zygote(188): Process 4146 terminated by signal (11)

Causes

You native library is probably trying to dynamically load another library it depends upon.

Solution

Use the GCC readelf for your ABI to dump the dynamic section of your native library and find out which libraries it depends upon. For example if you are compiling for the x86 ABI:


$ android-ndk-r8d/toolchains/x86-4.7/prebuilt/linux-x86/bin/i686-linux-android-readelf -d libmynativelib.so | grep NEEDED
 0x00000001 (NEEDED)                     Shared library: [libgnustl_shared.so]
 0x00000001 (NEEDED)                     Shared library: [libiconv.so]
 0x00000001 (NEEDED)                     Shared library: [libdl.so]
 0x00000001 (NEEDED)                     Shared library: [libstdc++.so]
 0x00000001 (NEEDED)                     Shared library: [libm.so]
 0x00000001 (NEEDED)                     Shared library: [libc.so]


In this example you only need to load libgnustl_shared.so and libiconv.so before your libmynativelib.so to resolve the dependencies and make the System.loadLibrary() function call happy (the other standard libraries are already preloaded for you by Android). In your static section you will then include the following lines:

static {

        System.loadLibrary("gnustl_shared");

        System.loadLibrary("iconv");

        System.loadLibrary("mynativelib");

}

This should solve the problem.