[oe] State of libcs in OE-Core glibc/uclibc/musl

[Khem Raj]

Hi All,

I would like to get everyone’s opinion on the libcs we maintain in OE-Core, as of now, we have

glibc + cross localedef + kconfig patches which are left overs from eglibc days
uclibc - which is more of less unmaintained

Its a significant effort to keep forward porting the kconfig changes since it touches everywhere in glibc, (I do it in my local glibc tree)
almost every week there is a commit in upstream glibc which breaks the kconfig patches, I know there are distribution profiles
like poky-tiny which uses glibc in this capacity, and may be then their are other custom one’s made on top, I would like us to not carry major
patches which almost makes our component a fork due to obvious maintenance cost. I think there is viable alternatives to tiny libcs in musl now.

I would like to make a proposal for 2.1 release where

1. Drop kconfig support in glibc and we become inline with upstream
2. Move musl support to OE-Core from meta-musl
3. Drop uclibc or leave it in current broken state, I would like to pull it out into a layer in meta-openembedded and we can leave the core plumbing as it is in OE-Core
4. Poky-tiny switches to use musl

may other disto’s have moved to using musl as system C library e.g. alpine linux, openwrt, and I am also deploying it in  real products
its pretty mature and well maintained with very healthy community around it. Right now meta-musl is capable of building and running
core-image-sato/core-image-weston for all supported Qemu arches in OE-Core, the amount of software it can build is no less than uclibc
support in OE-Core.

if collectively we think, this is a good move then I can work on all of above items in early phases of 2.1 so we can settle any
outstanding issues, due to the shuffle especially in poky-tiny

Thoughts ?

-Khem
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