C C++ Shared Libraries ELF runtime linker gcc 3.x has %-fuse-cxa-atexit% and your libc needs to support __cxa_atexit() in order to solve this problem. Other than that, if you can't change the code, patch PHP to not dlclose() the shared extensions on shutdown to avoid the crash. See %http://lerdorf.com/dlclose.txt% for the patch. If a C++ shared library is loaded by a C runtime, like PHP, you could end up with weird %__throw()% problems. An annoying workaround is to link your C runtime against %libstdc++.so% to prevent the linker from pulling in the %__throw% symbol from %libgcc.a%.