4 ms·

Only because people aren't putting in the effort to build their binaries properly. You need to link against the oldest glibc version that has all the symbols yo

Only because people aren't putting in the effort to build their binaries properly. You need to link against the oldest glibc version that has all the symbols you need, and then your binary will actually work everywhere(*). * Except for non-glibc distributions of course.

ok123456 10mo ago
If it requires effort to be correct, that's a bad design. Why doesn't the glibc use the version tag to do the appropriate mapping?
- mikkupikku 10mo ago
  I think even calling it a "design" is dubious. It's an attribute of these systems that arose out of the circumstance, nobody ever sat down and said it should be this way. Even Torvalds complaining about it doesn't mean it gets fixed, it's not analogous to Steve Jobs complaining about a thing because Torvalds is only in charge of one piece of the puzzle, and the whole image that emerges from all these different groups only loosely collaborating with each other isn't going to be anybody's ideal. In other words, the Linux desktop as a whole is a Bazaar, not Cathedral.
  - ok123456 10mo ago
    > In other words, the Linux desktop as a whole is a Bazaar, not Cathedral. This was true in the 90s, not the 2020s. There are enough moneyed interests that control the entirety of Linux now. If someone at Canonical or Red Hat thought a glibc version translation layer (think WINE, but for running software targeted for Linux systems made more than the last breaking glibc version) was a good enough idea, it could get implemented pretty rapidly. Instead of win32+wine being the only stable abi on Linux, Linux could have the most stable abi on Linux.
LegionMammal978 10mo ago
But to link against an old glibc version, you need to compile on an old distro, on a VM. And you'll have a rough time if some part of the build depends on a tool too new for your VM. It would be infinitely simpler if one could simply 'cross-compile' down to older symbol versions, but the tooling does not make this easy at all.
- nineteen999 10mo ago
  Huh? Bullshit. You could totally compile and link in a container.
  - LeFantome 10mo ago
    Ok, so you agree with him except where he says “in a VM” because you say you can also do it “in a container”. Of course, you both leave out that you could do it “on real hardware”. But none of this matters. The real point is that you have to compile on an old distro. If he left out “in a VM”, you would have had nothing to correct.
    - nineteen999 10mo ago
      I'm not disagreeing that glibc symbol versioning could be better. I raised it because this is probably one of the few valid use cases for containers where they would have a large advantage over a heavyweight VM. But it's like complaining that you might need a VM or container to compile your software for Win16 or Win32s. Nobody is using those anymore. Nor really old Linux distributions. And if they do, they're not really going to complain about having to use a VM or container. As C/C++ programmer, the thing I notice is ... the people who complain about this most loudly are the web dev crowd who don't speak C/C++, when some ancient game doesn't work on their obscure Arch/Gentoo/Ubuntu distribution and they don't know how to fix it. Boo hoo. But they'll happily take a paycheck for writing a bunch of shit Go/Ruby/PHP code that runs on Linux 24/7 without downtime - not because of the quality of their code, but due to the reliability of the platform at _that_ particular task. Go figure.
      - 10mo ago
forrestthewoods 10mo ago
> Only because people aren't putting in the effort to build their binaries properly. Because Linux userland is an unmitigated clusterfuck of bad design that makes this really really really hard. GCC/Clang and Glibc make it effectively impossible almost impossible to do this on their own. The only way you can actually do this is: 1. create a userland container from the past 2. use Zig which moved oceans and mountains to make it somewhat tractable It's awful.
- microtonal 10mo ago
  We are using Nix to do this. It’s only a few lines of code. We build a gcc 14 stdenv that uses an old glibc. But I agree that this should just be a simple target SDK flag. I think the issue is that the Linux community is generally hostile towards proprietary software and it’s less of an issue for FLOSS because they can always be compiled against the latest.
- account42 9mo ago
  This is not a problem with the userland, but with the SDK - or rather a lack of one.
TUSF 10mo ago
> You need to link against the oldest glibc version that has all the symbols you need Or at least the oldest one made before glibc's latest backwards incompatible ABI break.
chrismorgan 10mo ago
I don’t understand why this is the case, and would like to understand. If I want only functions f1 and f2 which were introduced in glibc versions v1 and v2, why do I have to build with v2 rather than v3? Shouldn’t the symbols be named something like glibc_v1_f1 and glibc_v2_f2 regardless of whether you’re compiling against glibc v2 or glibc v3? If it is instead something like “compiling against vN uses symbols glibc_vN_f1 and glibc_vN_f2” combined with glibc v3 providing glibc_v1_f1, glibc_v2_f1, glibc_v3_f1, glibc_v2_f2 and glbc_v3_f2… why would it be that way?
- Denvercoder9 10mo ago
  > why would it be that way? It allows (among other things) the glibc developers to change struct layouts while remaining backwards compatible. E.g. if function f1 takes a struct as argument, and its layout changes between v2 and v3, then glibc_v2_f1 and glibc_v3_f1 have different ABIs.
- rcxdude 10mo ago
  Individual functions may have a lot of different versions. They do only update them if there is an ABI change (so you may have e.g. f1_v1, f1_v2, f2_v2, f2_v3 as synbols in v3 of glibc) but there's no easy way to say 'give me v2 of every function'. If you compile against v3 you'll get f2_v3 and f1_v2 and so it won't work on v2.
  - chrismorgan 10mo ago
    Why are they changing? And I presume there must be disadvantages to staying on the old symbols, or else they wouldn’t be changing them—so what are those disadvantages?
    - account42 9mo ago
      Depends on the functions. One example is memcpy - the API specifies that the source and destination must not overlap but the original implementation in glibc didn't care. When they wanted to optimize the implementation they decided to introduce a new version of memcpy rather than breaking older binaries that inadvertently relied on on the existing behavior even if that was never guaranteed by the API. Old binaries keep getting the older but slower memcpy, new binaries get the optimized memcpy. Other examples are keeping bug compatibility, when standards are revised to require incompatible behavior, or to introduce additional safety features that require additional (hidden) arguments automatically passed to functions which changes their ABI.

ok123456 10mo ago

If it requires effort to be correct, that's a bad design. Why doesn't the glibc use the version tag to do the appropriate mapping?

mikkupikku 10mo ago
I think even calling it a "design" is dubious. It's an attribute of these systems that arose out of the circumstance, nobody ever sat down and said it should be this way. Even Torvalds complaining about it doesn't mean it gets fixed, it's not analogous to Steve Jobs complaining about a thing because Torvalds is only in charge of one piece of the puzzle, and the whole image that emerges from all these different groups only loosely collaborating with each other isn't going to be anybody's ideal. In other words, the Linux desktop as a whole is a Bazaar, not Cathedral.
- ok123456 10mo ago
  > In other words, the Linux desktop as a whole is a Bazaar, not Cathedral. This was true in the 90s, not the 2020s. There are enough moneyed interests that control the entirety of Linux now. If someone at Canonical or Red Hat thought a glibc version translation layer (think WINE, but for running software targeted for Linux systems made more than the last breaking glibc version) was a good enough idea, it could get implemented pretty rapidly. Instead of win32+wine being the only stable abi on Linux, Linux could have the most stable abi on Linux.

LegionMammal978 10mo ago

But to link against an old glibc version, you need to compile on an old distro, on a VM. And you'll have a rough time if some part of the build depends on a tool too new for your VM. It would be infinitely simpler if one could simply 'cross-compile' down to older symbol versions, but the tooling does not make this easy at all.

nineteen999 10mo ago
Huh? Bullshit. You could totally compile and link in a container.
- LeFantome 10mo ago
  Ok, so you agree with him except where he says “in a VM” because you say you can also do it “in a container”. Of course, you both leave out that you could do it “on real hardware”. But none of this matters. The real point is that you have to compile on an old distro. If he left out “in a VM”, you would have had nothing to correct.
  - nineteen999 10mo ago
    I'm not disagreeing that glibc symbol versioning could be better. I raised it because this is probably one of the few valid use cases for containers where they would have a large advantage over a heavyweight VM. But it's like complaining that you might need a VM or container to compile your software for Win16 or Win32s. Nobody is using those anymore. Nor really old Linux distributions. And if they do, they're not really going to complain about having to use a VM or container. As C/C++ programmer, the thing I notice is ... the people who complain about this most loudly are the web dev crowd who don't speak C/C++, when some ancient game doesn't work on their obscure Arch/Gentoo/Ubuntu distribution and they don't know how to fix it. Boo hoo. But they'll happily take a paycheck for writing a bunch of shit Go/Ruby/PHP code that runs on Linux 24/7 without downtime - not because of the quality of their code, but due to the reliability of the platform at _that_ particular task. Go figure.
    - 10mo ago

forrestthewoods 10mo ago

> Only because people aren't putting in the effort to build their binaries properly. Because Linux userland is an unmitigated clusterfuck of bad design that makes this really really really hard. GCC/Clang and Glibc make it effectively impossible almost impossible to do this on their own. The only way you can actually do this is: 1. create a userland container from the past 2. use Zig which moved oceans and mountains to make it somewhat tractable It's awful.

microtonal 10mo ago
We are using Nix to do this. It’s only a few lines of code. We build a gcc 14 stdenv that uses an old glibc. But I agree that this should just be a simple target SDK flag. I think the issue is that the Linux community is generally hostile towards proprietary software and it’s less of an issue for FLOSS because they can always be compiled against the latest.
account42 9mo ago
This is not a problem with the userland, but with the SDK - or rather a lack of one.

TUSF 10mo ago

> You need to link against the oldest glibc version that has all the symbols you need Or at least the oldest one made before glibc's latest backwards incompatible ABI break.

chrismorgan 10mo ago

I don’t understand why this is the case, and would like to understand. If I want only functions f1 and f2 which were introduced in glibc versions v1 and v2, why do I have to build with v2 rather than v3? Shouldn’t the symbols be named something like glibc_v1_f1 and glibc_v2_f2 regardless of whether you’re compiling against glibc v2 or glibc v3? If it is instead something like “compiling against vN uses symbols glibc_vN_f1 and glibc_vN_f2” combined with glibc v3 providing glibc_v1_f1, glibc_v2_f1, glibc_v3_f1, glibc_v2_f2 and glbc_v3_f2… why would it be that way?

Denvercoder9 10mo ago
> why would it be that way? It allows (among other things) the glibc developers to change struct layouts while remaining backwards compatible. E.g. if function f1 takes a struct as argument, and its layout changes between v2 and v3, then glibc_v2_f1 and glibc_v3_f1 have different ABIs.
rcxdude 10mo ago
Individual functions may have a lot of different versions. They do only update them if there is an ABI change (so you may have e.g. f1_v1, f1_v2, f2_v2, f2_v3 as synbols in v3 of glibc) but there's no easy way to say 'give me v2 of every function'. If you compile against v3 you'll get f2_v3 and f1_v2 and so it won't work on v2.
- chrismorgan 10mo ago
  Why are they changing? And I presume there must be disadvantages to staying on the old symbols, or else they wouldn’t be changing them—so what are those disadvantages?
  - account42 9mo ago
    Depends on the functions. One example is memcpy - the API specifies that the source and destination must not overlap but the original implementation in glibc didn't care. When they wanted to optimize the implementation they decided to introduce a new version of memcpy rather than breaking older binaries that inadvertently relied on on the existing behavior even if that was never guaranteed by the API. Old binaries keep getting the older but slower memcpy, new binaries get the optimized memcpy. Other examples are keeping bug compatibility, when standards are revised to require incompatible behavior, or to introduce additional safety features that require additional (hidden) arguments automatically passed to functions which changes their ABI.