GNU C Library: History
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The GNU C Library, commonly known as glibc, is the GNU Project's implementation of the C standard library. Despite its name, it now also directly supports C++ (and, indirectly, other programming languages). It was started in the 1980s by the Free Software Foundation (FSF) for the GNU operating system. Released under the GNU Lesser General Public License, glibc is free software. The GNU C Library project provides the core libraries for the GNU system, as well as many systems that use Linux as the kernel. These libraries provide critical APIs including ISO C11, POSIX.1-2008, BSD, OS-specific APIs and more. These APIs include such foundational facilities as open, read, write, malloc, printf, getaddrinfo, dlopen, pthread create, crypt, login, exit and more.

  • glibc
  • posix.1-2008
  • linux

1. History

The glibc project was initially written mostly by Roland McGrath, working for the Free Software Foundation (FSF) in the 1980s as a teenager.[1] In February 1988, FSF described glibc as having nearly completed the functionality required by ANSI C.[2] By 1992, it had the ANSI C-1989 and POSIX.1-1990 functions implemented and work was under way on POSIX.2.[3] In September 1995 Ulrich Drepper made his first contribution to the glibc and by 1997 most commits were made by him. Drepper held the maintainership position for many years and until 2012 accumulated 63% of all commits to the project.[4]

In May 2009 glibc was migrated to a Git repository.[4]

1.1. Linux libc

In 1994, the developers of the Linux kernel forked glibc. Their fork, "Linux libc", was maintained separately until around 1998. Because the copyright attribution was insufficient, changes could not be merged back to the GNU Libc.[5]

When the FSF released glibc 2.0 in January 1997, the kernel developers discontinued Linux libc due to glibc 2.0’s superior compliance with POSIX standards.[6] glibc 2.0 also had better internationalisation and more in-depth translation, IPv6 capability, 64-bit data access, facilities for multithreaded applications, future version compatibility, and the code was more portable.[7]

The last-used version of Linux libc used the internal name (soname) libc.so.5. Following on from this, glibc 2.x on Linux uses the soname libc.so.6[8]

1.2. Steering Committee

Starting in 2001 the library's development had been overseen by a committee,[9] with Ulrich Drepper[10] kept as the lead contributor and maintainer. The steering committee installation was surrounded by a public controversy as it was openly described by Ulrich Drepper as a failed hostile takeover maneuver by Richard Stallman.[11][12][13]

In March 2012, the steering committee voted to disband itself and remove Drepper in favor of a community-driven development process, with Ryan Arnold, Maxim Kuvyrkov, Joseph Myers, Carlos O'Donell, and Alexandre Oliva holding the responsibility of GNU maintainership (but no extra decision-making power).[14][15]

In July 2017, 30 years after he started glibc, Roland McGrath announced his departure, "declaring myself maintainer emeritus and withdrawing from direct involvement in the project. These past several months, if not the last few years, have proven that you don't need me any more".[1]

1.3. Debian Switches

After longstanding controversies around Drepper's leadership style and external contribution acceptance,[16][17][18] Debian switched publicly to the glibc fork EGLIBC in 2009 [19] and back to glibc with the Debian 8.0 (Jessie) release in April 2015.[20]

1.4. Version History

For most systems, the version of glibc can be obtained by executing the lib file (for example, /lib/libc.so.6).

2. Functionality

glibc provides the functionality required by the Single UNIX Specification, POSIX (1c, 1d, and 1j) and some of the functionality required by ISO C11, ISO C99, Berkeley Unix (BSD) interfaces, the System V Interface Definition (SVID) and the X/Open Portability Guide (XPG), Issue 4.2, with all extensions common to XSI (X/Open System Interface) compliant systems along with all X/Open UNIX extensions.

In addition, glibc also provides extensions that have been deemed useful or necessary while developing GNU.

2.1. Supported Hardware and Kernels

glibc is used in systems that run many different kernels and different hardware architectures. Its most common use is in systems using the Linux kernel on x86 hardware, however, officially supported hardware[36] includes: 32-bit ARM and its newer 64-bit ISA (AArch64), C-SKY, DEC Alpha, IA-64, Motorola m68k, MicroBlaze, MIPS, Nios II, PA-RISC, PowerPC, RISC-V, s390, SPARC, and x86 (old versions support TILE). It officially supports the Hurd and Linux kernels. Additionally, there are heavily patched versions that run on the kernels of FreeBSD and NetBSD (from which Debian GNU/kFreeBSD and Debian GNU/NetBSD systems are built, respectively), as well as a forked-version of OpenSolaris.[37] It is also used (in an edited form) and named libroot.so in BeOS and Haiku.[38]

2.2. Use in Small Devices

glibc has been criticized as being "bloated" and slower than other libraries in the past, e.g. by Linus Torvalds[39] and embedded Linux programmers. For this reason, several alternative C standard libraries have been created which emphasize a smaller footprint. However, many small-device projects use GNU libc over the smaller alternatives because of its application support, standards compliance, and completeness. Examples include Openmoko[40] and Familiar Linux for iPaq handhelds (when using the GPE display software).[41]

3. Compatibility Layers

There are compatibility layers ("shims") to allow programs written for other ecosystems to run on glibc interface offering systems. These include libhybris, a compatibility layer for Android's Bionic, and Wine, which can be seen as compatibility layer from Windows APIs to glibc and other native APIs available on Unix-like systems.

The content is sourced from: https://handwiki.org/wiki/Software:GNU_C_Library

References

  1. "Roland McGrath bows out as glibc maintainer [LWN.net"]. 2017-07-07. https://lwn.net/Articles/727383/. 
  2. "GNU's Bulletin, vol. 1 no. 4, February, 1988". https://www.gnu.org/bulletins/bull4.html. "Most libraries are done. Roland McGrath […] has a nearly complete set of ANSI C library functions. We hope they will be ready some time this spring." 
  3. "GNU's Bulletin, vol. 1 no. 12". https://www.gnu.org/bulletins/bull12.html. "It now contains all of the ANSI C-1989 and POSIX.1-1990 functions, and work is in progress on POSIX.2 and Unix functions (BSD and System V)" 
  4. Corbet, Jonathan (28 March 2012). "A turning point for GNU libc". LWN.net. https://lwn.net/Articles/488847/. "Of the nearly 19,000 commits found in the project's git repository (which contains changes back to 1995), over 12,000 were made by Ulrich." 
  5. "History of glibc and Linux libc". http://freesoftwaremagazine.com/articles/history_of_glibc_and_linux_libc/. 
  6. "Forking: it could even happen to you". 12 September 2008. https://www.linux.com/archive/feature/3874. "the split between GNU LIBC and the Linux LIBC -- it went on for years while Linux stabilized, and then the forks re-merged into one project" 
  7. Lee, Elliot (2001). "A Technical Comparison of glibc 2.x With Legacy System Libraries". https://people.redhat.com/~sopwith/old/glibc-vs-libc5.html. 
  8. "Fear of Forking essay, see "6. glibc --> Linux libc --> glibc"". http://linuxmafia.com/faq/Licensing_and_Law/forking.html. 
  9. "glibc homepage". https://www.gnu.org/software/libc/. "In 2001 The GNU C Library Steering Committee …, was formed and currently consists of Mark Brown, Paul Eggert, Andreas Jaeger, Jakub Jelinek, Roland McGrath and Andreas Schwab." 
  10. "Ulrich Drepper". LinkedIn. https://www.linkedin.com/in/ulrichdrepper. 
  11. Drepper, Ulrich (2000-06-26). "RMS is at it again". sourceware.org. https://sourceware.org/ml/libc-hacker/2000-06/msg00180.html. "A few weeks ago RMS started the next attack on me (a single mail, followed by indirect tries to take influence, followed by another mail today). The essence is that he complains I am not following "GNU policies" and therefore have to be replaced by a steering committee of which I could be a part. Some of you (namely Roland and Andreas S.) probably know about this since he proposed both as other members of the committee. In addition there was Mark Brown listed (I know somebody of this name at IBM who would also fit in this group but I'm not sure whether it is really him.) Anyhow, I completely reject this. It is not helping at all, the opposite is true. First, I am not aware of any essential policies I'm violating. The only ones are that I'm not following orders from RMS which clearly have political intends (which is of course a sacrilege) and possibly that I do not care about Winblowz (if the latter counts at all). None of this will change in any way." 
  12. Drepper, Ulrich (2001-08-15). "glibc 2.2.4". sourceware.com. https://sourceware.org/ml/libc-announce/2001/msg00000.html. "And now for some not so nice things. Stallman recently tried what I would call a hostile takeover of the glibc development. He tried to conspire behind my back and persuade the other main developers to take control so that in the end he is in control and can dictate whatever pleases him. This attempt failed but he kept on pressuring people everywhere and it got really ugly. In the end I agreed to the creation of a so-called "steering committee" (SC)." 
  13. rms-accused-of-attempting-glibc-hostile-takeover on slashdot.com on August 19, 2001 https://slashdot.org/story/01/08/19/2039211/rms-accused-of-attempting-glibc-hostile-takeover
  14. McGrath, Roland (26 March 2012). "glibc steering committee dissolving". Sourceware.org. https://sourceware.org/ml/libc-alpha/2012-03/msg01038.html. 
  15. Myers, Joseph S. (26 March 2012). "GNU C Library development and maintainers". Sourceware.org. https://sourceware.org/ml/libc-alpha/2012-03/msg01040.html. 
  16. Ulrich Drepper 2007-10-03 06:13:55 UTC "This has nothing to do with "x86 only". All ABIs designed by people who have a bit of understanding require no change. Any change will negatively impact well designed architectures for the sole benefit of this embedded crap. But your own version of the file in the add-on." https://sourceware.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=5070#c5
  17. Drepper, Ulrich (2005-05-25). "Dictatorship of the Minorities". udrepper.livejournal.com. https://udrepper.livejournal.com/7326.html. "Which architectures are worthwhile supporting? […]. Not only do we have to look for irrelevance (what percentage cares about Vax, PArisc) support, we also have to look at the level of added complexity the support requires. Some ABIs are just deliberately defined to be different from others (see IA-64) which requires huge amounts of effort to be spent. There are also significantly diverging capabilities (e. g., the lack of atomic operations in too many architectures). This far too often causes to unnecessarily crippled code since writing code in a way which allows optimal use in all situations is very difficult. The solution must be to restrict support to only a handful of architectures which are supported in the project. All other support must happen outside the tree and therefore all the work has to be done by the special interest groups. I don't want to say we follow all these points perfectly, but for a big project glibc certainly comes closest to this." 
  18. Jarno, Aurélien (2009-05-05). "Debian is switching to EGLIBC". aurel32.net. https://blog.aurel32.net/?p=47. "More friendly upstream (especially with regard to embedded architectures): “Encourage cooperation, communication, civility, and respect among developers” (as opposed to this)." 
  19. timothy (2009-05-06). "Debian Switching From Glibc To Eglibc". Slashdot. https://linux.slashdot.org/story/09/05/06/2050216/debian-switching-from-glibc-to-eglibc. 
  20. Debian package changelog https://metadata.ftp-master.debian.org/changelogs/main/g/glibc/stable_changelog
  21. "CosmicCuttlefish/ReleaseNotes - Ubuntu Wiki". https://wiki.ubuntu.com/CosmicCuttlefish/ReleaseNotes#Toolchain_Upgrades_.2B2D3e4P4P-. 
  22. "Chapter 5. RHEL 8.0.0 release Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8". https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-us/red_hat_enterprise_linux/8/html/8.0_release_notes/rhel-8_0_0_release#platform-tools. 
  23. "Chapter 2. What's new in Debian 10". https://www.debian.org/releases/stable/amd64/release-notes/ch-whats-new.en.html#newdistro. 
  24. "Changes/GLIBC228". https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Changes/GLIBC228. 
  25. "Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 1598403". https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1598403. 
  26. "sourceware.org Git - glibc.git/blob - NEWS". https://sourceware.org/git/?p=glibc.git;a=blob;f=NEWS;hb=de44ab67aa4eec369deea828733567c35a0611c0. 
  27. "DiscoDingo/ReleaseNotes - Ubuntu Wiki". https://wiki.ubuntu.com/DiscoDingo/ReleaseNotes#Toolchain_Upgrades_.2B2D3e4P4P-. 
  28. "Changes/GLIBC229". https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Changes/GLIBC229. 
  29. "Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 1653403". https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1653403. 
  30. "sourceware.org Git - glibc.git/blob - NEWS". https://sourceware.org/git/?p=glibc.git;a=blob;f=NEWS;hb=HEAD. 
  31. "EoanErmine/ReleaseNotes - Ubuntu Wiki". https://wiki.ubuntu.com/EoanErmine/ReleaseNotes#Toolchain_Upgrades_.2B2D3e4P4P-. 
  32. "Changes/GLIBC230". https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Changes/GLIBC230. 
  33. "Focal (20.04) : glibc package : Ubuntu". https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/focal/+source/glibc. 
  34. "Changes/GLIBC231". https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Changes/GLIBC231. 
  35. "The GNU C Library version 2.32 is now available". https://sourceware.org/pipermail/libc-announce/2020/000029.html. 
  36. "The GNU C Library machine maintainers.". https://sourceware.org/glibc/wiki/MAINTAINERS#Machine_maintainers. 
  37. Bartley, David; Spang, Michael. "GNU/kOpenSolaris (GNU libc/base + OpenSolaris kernel)". https://csclub.uwaterloo.ca/~dtbartle/opensolaris/. 
  38. "Haiku Source". https://github.com/haiku/haiku/tree/master/src/system/libroot. "libroot.so is not part of GNU project and is included in Haiku source code." 
  39. Torvalds, Linus (9 January 2002). "Posting to the glibc mailing list". http://ecos.sourceware.org/ml/libc-alpha/2002-01/msg00079.html. 
  40. "OpenMoko components". http://wiki.openmoko.org/wiki/OpenMoko. "We will use glibc (not uClibC) … The alternatives may save more space and be more optimized, but are more likely to give us integration headaches" 
  41. "Re: [Familiar] Which glibc for Familiar 0.8.4  ?". https://marc.info/?l=familiar&m=118666899424374&w=2. "Question: which version of the GLIBC was used to build the Familiar 0.8.4 ? Answer: 2.3.3" 
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