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

[Andre McCurdy]

On Fri, Oct 30, 2015 at 9:21 AM, akuster808 <akuster808 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
> On 10/29/2015 08:42 AM, Khem Raj wrote:
>> 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
>
> Inline with upstream make a lot of sence and will help make maintenance
> simpler going forward.
>
>> 2. Move musl support to OE-Core from meta-musl
>
> I see no issue with this.
>
>> 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
> If its not being maintained, then drop by 2.1.

Maintenance of uclibc seems to have moved to the uclibc-ng project:

  http://www.uclibc-ng.org/

Developers are active and they make regular releases. Buildroot
switched to uclibc-ng as the default uclibc a few months ago and it
seems to be working OK for them:

  http://git.buildroot.net/buildroot/commit/?id=68d4a3b5a6a6d03d67418e0b637628ecf9cbf192


>> 4. Poky-tiny switches to use musl
>
> If Poky-tiny is meant to showcase the smallest of the small , then that
> make sense.
>
> - armin
>
>>
>> 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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