Photo by Julian Schroeder

I just spent quite a few hours tracking down a subtle problem with OpenCV's new Java bindings on gcc platforms, like my Ubuntu servers. The short story is that the default for linked symbols was recently changed to hidden on gcc systems, and the Java native interfaces weren't updated to override that default, so any Java programs using native OpenCV functions would mysteriously fail with an UnsatisfiedLinkError. Here's my workaround:

--- a/cmake/OpenCVCompilerOptions.cmake
+++ b/cmake/OpenCVCompilerOptions.cmake
@@ -252,8 +252,8 @@ set(OPENCV_EXTRA_EXE_LINKER_FLAGS_DEBUG   "${OPENCV_EXTRA_EXE_LINKER_FLAGS_DEBUG
 
 # set default visibility to hidden
 if(CMAKE_COMPILER_IS_GNUCXX AND CMAKE_OPENCV_GCC_VERSION_NUM GREATER 399)
-  add_extra_compiler_option(-fvisibility=hidden)
-  add_extra_compiler_option(-fvisibility-inlines-hidden)
+#  add_extra_compiler_option(-fvisibility=hidden)
+#  add_extra_compiler_option(-fvisibility-inlines-hidden)
 endif()
 

The tricky part of tracking this down was that nm didn't show the .hidden attribute, so the library symbols appeared fine, it was only when I switched to objdump after exhausting everything else I could think of that the problem became clear.

Anyway, I wanted to leave some Google breadcrumbs for anyone else who hits this! I've filed a bug with the OpenCV folks, hopefully it will be fixed soon.