An announcement from the uClibc project . . .

CodePoet Consulting is pleased to announce the immediate availability of uClibc 0.9.16. This release adds full support (including a native shared library loader) for the CRIS architecture, contributed by Tobias Anderberg. Stefan Allius contributed a number of patches to fix the initialization order for shared library global constructors and… destructors as well as a large number of SuperH fixes and cleanups. uClibc now compiles with newer versions of gcc (i.e. RedHat 8.0). Thanks to Christian Michon, uClibc no longer requires perl to compile. Steven J. Hill fixed dlopen for mips. Several problems with pty and tty handling were fixed. Manuel Novoa added new support for an /etc/TZ file to globally set the system timezone, and fixed up a number of remaining wide char issues. Manuel is still hard at work on bringing full locale support (optional of course) to uClibc. 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!

Erik and Manuel have been working on a document describing some of the differences between uClibc and glibc. It's not yet 100% complete, and it hasn't been nicely formatted yet. But it contains a lot of helpful information and is worth a look.

And finally, the the old uClibc configuration system has been completely removed (and there was much rejoicing). It was replaced with an entirely new system based on LinuxKernelConf, which has since been included into Linux 2.5.45, so it looks like Erik made the right choice. Of course, those who have existing build systems using uClibc will need to make a few changes… We think the change is worth it.

As usual, the Changelog and source code for this release are available here. You might want to download uClibc from the closest kernel.org mirror site. Just pick the closest mirror site, and then go to http://www.XX.kernel.org/pub/linux/libs/uclibc/ to download uClibc, where XX is your two letter country code.

Updated gcc-3.2 and gcc-2.95 toolchains will be released shortly.

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.

 
This article was originally published on LinuxDevices.com and has been donated to the open source community by QuinStreet Inc. Please visit LinuxToday.com for up-to-date news and articles about Linux and open source.