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

[Khem Raj]

On Fri, Oct 30, 2015 at 11:31 AM, Andre McCurdy <armccurdy at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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

Thats something needs to waited and watched.

>
>
>>> 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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