Switching from uClibc to glibc as the default in Buildroot?

[Rob Landley]

On 06/11/14 02:35, Thomas Petazzoni wrote:
> Dear Jody Bruchon,
> 
> On Tue, 10 Jun 2014 17:43:34 -0400, Jody Bruchon wrote:
> 
>> I'm waiting for musl to be sufficiently stable at this point;

It seems reasonably stable to me. I keep meaning to port my aboriginal
linux project over to it but toybox is eating all my non-work
development time. (I test toybox using the musl wrapper, which sadly
means I'm only testing the x86-64 musl variant. Test of the testing is
still against glibc and the old patched-up uClibc in aboriginal.)

> musl is indeed a very interesting project, and we've added support for
> it in Buildroot in our last release. The musl developers are very
> reactive and helpful when we're facing issues.
> 
> However, one thing that musl doesn't handle currently is the support
> for noMMU architectures. This remains an area where uClibc is essential.
> 
>> it's hard to keep a libc patched on my own. Perhaps a fork of the
>> project is in order?
> 
> It looks to me that a fork is now the only solution. However, this
> requires someone having a good knowledge of the uClibc internals and
> the time to maintain a new project, which is not that easy to find.

Adding nommu support to musl would be easier than maintaining a uClibc
fork. The big blocker is lack of a nommu test environments: those of us
who don't do it yet tend not to have one set up.

Is there an existing nommu test image that runs under qemu? (Possibly
one of http://wiki.qemu.org/Testing#QEMU_disk_images perhaps?) Adding a
musl chroot under a working system is a lot easier than getting an
initial "kernel, emulator, and some libc agree enough to boot to a shell
prompt" setup working for a new layout.

Rob