Switching from uClibc to glibc as the default in Buildroot?

Rich Felker dalias at aerifal.cx
Tue Feb 18 23:17:59 UTC 2014


On Tue, Feb 18, 2014 at 11:14:47PM +0100, Thomas Petazzoni wrote:
> However, due to the reasons mentioned above, supporting uClibc has
> proven to be more and more complicated. Therefore, at the latest
> Buildroot Developers Meeting, we discussed the idea of switching to
> using glibc as the default C library in Buildroot for the
> architectures that glibc supports.

As maintainer of musl libc (http://www.musl-libc.org), I'd like to
suggest it as an alternative to switching to glibc. Obviously sticking
with uClibc as the default would probably be the least invasive for
your user base, but if that turns out not to be feasible, I think musl
might be a better fit for most Buildroot users. Both musl's small size
and strong robustness aims are attractive from an embedded
perspective. We are about to make a 1.0 release and have active
development plans following 1.0 as well.

musl's arch coverage is still considerably less than uClibc's or
glibc's, but the amount of work needed to add a port is also much
lower (less than 20 small mandatory port-specific files aside from
bits headers to match kernel/ABI-specific types) and we have an active
development community willing to help getting additional ports
integrated upstream. Right now we have i386, x86_64, arm(32),
mips(32), microblaze, and powerpc(32); I expect to also merge the
in-progress superh port before the next release.

Rich


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