1805785 - Prevent Firefox from opening binary libraries in the installation directory after startup has completed

Status: NEW

(Toolkit :: Application Update, task, P3)

Description

[Robin Steuber (she/her) [:bytesized]]

The parent process and the fork server need to open, in advance, any of these libraries that they will need.

The best way to address this issue is going to be to initialize certain components in the fork server before fork() is called. It appears likely that if NSS and FFVPXRuntimeLinker are initialized earlier, the necessary libraries may all be opened.

If that doesn't completely solve the problem, it may be necessary to manually dlopen() some individual libraries. While the library is kept open (i.e. until dlclose() is called), subsequent attempts to open the same library are guaranteed to to get the same copy of the library, rather than a newer one that might be on disk.

One area of concern here is library initialization routines. There are certain things that the library could do, when initialized, that wouldn't react well to being forked. Some examples include starting a thread or looking up their PID and saving it to use later.