This problem turned out to be because the objects in libasan.a of gcc-6-branch are built with -fPIC / -DPIC : if 'PIC' is defined, the code in asan_linux.c is assuming it has been dynamically loaded , and so does not allow libasan.so NOT to be the first required dynamic library. But adding '-lasan' is a bad idea, since then the dlsym(RTLD_NEXT,"sigaction") actually resolves to __interception::sigaction which ends up calling itself until stack is exhausted.
For some reason (which I am trying to figure out, but which is not obvious) the gcc-7-branch libasan build does build all the libasan.a objects without -fPIC -DPIC correctly, and so does not have this problem. It looks like use of 'static-libasan' in GCC 6 builds is thoroughly disabled and broken because of libasan.a objects ARE built with -fPIC / -DPIC . Maybe I should raise a bug about this? Thanks & Regards, Jason
