Here are two important announcements from the uClibc project . . .

uClibc 0.9.17 is released

CodePoet Consulting is pleased to announce the immediate availability of uClibc 0.9.17. The biggest piece of news with this release, thanks to Manuel Novoa's continuing hard work, is that we now have fully standards compliant locale support (optional of course). The support works nicely, (though configuring the locales you wish to support is still manual — a task for the next release). Full locale data for over 300 locales adds approximately 250k. The collation data for all supported locales is roughly 180k. This may seem rather large to some — but it is much smaller than the approximately 40 MB needed by Glibc to provide the same data. And if you don't need it, you can either disable locale support entirely, or enable a smaller set of locales.

This release also fixes lots and lots of bugs. The arm architecture support (I am embarrassed to note) was totally broken in the last release, but is now working as expected. A security problem (a buffer overflow in getlogin_r) was fixed. And there were architecture updates across the board (x86, arm, powerpc, cris, h8300, sparc, and mips). And of course, this release includes the usual pile of bug fixes. Many thanks for the large number of patches and fixes that were contributed!

Unfortunately, this release is not binary compatible with earlier uClibc releases. As has been previously noted, uClibc does not (yet) attempt to ensure binary compatibility across releases. We will eventually do that (once we reach the “1.0” release) but not yet. A few bugs turned up that needed to be fixed, and the only good way to fix them was to change some fundamental data structure sizes. As a result, this release is _NOT_ binary compatible with earlier releases — you will need to recompile your applications. The x86, arm, powerpc, and mips architectures (i.e. the systems Erik has available in his office for testing) have been tested and are known to work following this change. Other architectures may need additional updates. Sorry about that, but it had to be done.

The uClibc 0.9.17 release can be downloaded here. The Changelog for this release is located here.

uClibc development systems updated, arm image added

CodePoet Consulting is pleased to make available full stand-alone uClibc based development systems for x86, powerpc, and arm. These ext2 filesystems contain all the development software you need to get started building your own applications linked against uClibc. By using a uClibc only system, you can avoid the painful cross-configuration problems that have made using uClibc somewhat painful in the past.

If you want to begin compiling and testing things using uClibc, but you don't feel like spending the hours it takes to download, configure, and build binutils, gcc, g++, make, gdb, strace, etc, then you may want to download these development systems and give them a try. I have tested each one (x86, powerpc, and arm) and verified that the included gcc and g++ compilers produce fully working uClibc linked executables.

Everything contained in these development system images is dynamically linked with uClibc 0.9.17, and was compiled using buildroot. If you wish to build your own system, just grab buildroot and run 'make'.

The uClibc/gcc toolchain builders were also updated, so if you want to build your own uClibc/gcc toolchain, but you don't want to use buildroot, grab the toolchain builders and give them a try.

The uClibc based development systems can be downloaded here . . .

• i386
• powerpc
• arm

Buildroot snapshots can be obtained here. Toolchain builder snapshots can be obtained here.

About uClibc

uClibc (aka µClibc/pronounced yew-see-lib-see) is a C library for developing embedded Linux systems. It is much smaller then the GNU C Library, but nearly all applications supported by glibc also work perfectly with uClibc. Porting applications from glibc to uClibc typically involves just recompiling the source code. uClibc even supports shared libraries and threading. It currently runs on standard Linux and MMU-less (also known as µClinux) systems with support for alpha, ARM, i386, i960, h8300, m68k, mips/mipsel, PowerPC, SH, SPARC, and v850 processors.

 
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