i have an android app which spawns many native executables dinamically linked with libraries i distribute with the package. To launch those binaries, i use the LD_LIBRARY_PATH environment variable to make them aware of the place to load the libraries from, but on some devices this doesn't work at all, the LD_LIBRARY_PATH is correctly updated but the binary fails to find the library anyway. This is not something i can reproduce because on my two devices ( Galaxy Nexus & Nexus 7 with stock roms ) it just works fine.
I tried many ways, for instance i spawn:
LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/my/package/custom/libs:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH && cd /binary/directory && ./binary
And :
String[] envp = { "LD_LIBRARY_PATH=" + libPath + ":$LD_LIBRARY_PATH" };
Process process = Runtime.getRuntime().exec( "su", envp );
writer = new DataOutputStream( process.getOutputStream() );
reader = new BufferedReader( new InputStreamReader( process.getInputStream() ) );
writer.writeBytes( "export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=" + libPath + ":$LD_LIBRARY_PATH\n" );
writer.flush();
But on those devices nothing seemed to work ... so i'm starting to think that this is a kernel related issue, some kernels ( like mine ) use the LD_LIBRARY_PATH, other kernels don't ( simply ignore it, or they're using just the LD_LIBRARY_PATH that was set on application startup, therefore there's no way to change it at runtime ).
I also tried to use System.load but it didn't work, probably because those libs are not JNI ... is there something i could try before starting to think about using statically linked binaries ?