Fixing libp11-kit.so.0: undefined symbol: ffi_type_pointer in ROS and CARLA Integration

While integrating ROS with the CARLA on Ubuntu 20.04, I encountered the following error when launching ROS nodes:

ImportError: /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libp11-kit.so.0: undefined symbol: ffi_type_pointer, version LIBFFI_BASE_7.0

This error caused my ROS nodes to crash, preventing proper communication with the CARLA simulator. After investigating, I discovered that the issue came from a version mismatch between libffi and p11-kit.

Development Environment

• Operating System: Ubuntu 20.04
• ROS Distro: Noetic
• CARLA Simulator: Version 0.9.13
• Python Version: Conda venv Python 3.8
• Environment Manager: Anaconda

Root Cause

• p11-kit: This library requires libffi 7.x or higher to resolve the ffi_type_pointer symbol.
• Conda Environment Conflict: My Conda environment had an older version of libffi (e.g., 3.2.x), which overrode the system library paths at runtime. This caused the dynamic linker to load the wrong version of libffi.

Solution To resolve the issue, I updated libffi in my Conda environment to a compatible version:

conda install libffi==3.3

This ensured that the version of libffi used at runtime was compatible with p11-kit, resolving the missing symbol error.

Conclusion

Some packages of ROS must be installed on system python, thus many issues could happen if you are managing Python environment using Conda. I hope this helps others encountering the same issue!

Thanks to following link:

https://blog.csdn.net/OrdinaryMatthew/article/details/131439895