Tag: software

uClibc 0.9.30 is available

About one year and a half after the release of the previous stable version, the release of uClibc 0.9.30 is a great event in the embedded Linux community. uClibc is a replacement for the glibc C library, implementing most of the features of glibc, while retaining a much smaller size and an incredible level of configurability.

The only changelog available is a list of Subversion commits that occurred between the 0.9.29 and the 0.9.30 releases, so it is quite difficult to extract what are the important bits. However, a news from August 2008 on uClibc.org website gives an idea of what happened in the 0.9.30 version :

  • a lot of fixes for the various architectures, and other tweaks and improvements
  • an improved configurability that allows to enable/disable a larger number of features, now including
    • Realtime-related family of SUSv functions (option UCLIBC_HAS_REALTIME, which enables aio_*() functions, mq_*() functions, mlock() family of functions, sched_*() functions, sem_*() functions, a few signal-related functions and the timer_*() functions). Threading support requires the realtime functions, so it depends on this option.
    • Advanced realtime-related family of SUSv functions (option UCLIBC_HAS_ADVANCED_REALTIME, which enables a few advanced clock_*() and mq_*() functions, and a large number of posix_spawnattr_*() and posix_spawn_*() functions)
    • epoll (option UCLIBC_HAS_EPOLL)
    • extended attributes (option UCLIBC_HAS_XATTR)
    • other options to enable/disable compatibility/deprecated APIs
  • it is now possible to build uClibc without network support at all. The global option is UCLIBC_HAS_NETWORK_SUPPORT, and can be further refined with UCLIBC_HAS_SOCKET to enable just the socket support (for example if only Unix sockets are used), UCLIBC_HAS_IPV4 to get IPv4 functionality, which of course requires the socket support, and UCLIBC_HAS_IPV6 for IPv6.

A quick look at the differences between the available options allows to see another set of features:

  • Support for the AVR32 and Xtensa architecture has been added
  • A configuration option to enable non-functional stubs for features that are not implemented on a given architecture. This option for example enables a stub fork() function on non-MMU architectures so that applications can easily be recompiled, without checking all the fork() sites from the beginning
  • Options to enable/disable Linux-specific or BSD-specific functions

The allnoconfig setup with shared library is reported to have been reduced by 30%, though the allnoconfig setup doesn’t necessarily correspond to a classical usage of uClibc.

The tarball is available here.

Crosstool-ng 1.3.0 released!

Crosstool-ng is a tool that allows automated building of cross-compiling toolchain, easing a process known to be very difficult. Crosstool-ng has been started as a rewrite of Crosstool, the famous tool authored by Dan Kegel. Now Crosstool-ng offers several improvements over Crosstool: an active development community, stable releases, support of uClibc, glibc and eglibc, a menuconfig configuration interface, a good documentation, etc.

Yann Morin, the lead developer of Crosstool-ng announced today the release of Crosstool-ng 1.3.0. He says: « There has been many improvements, new features and bug fixes all around. If I had to, my pick would be the support for the gcc 4.3 series. But I would also have to tell you about the latest uClibc version, support for eglibc, and the ability to build bare-metal compilers, and the list would not yet be complete… »

He also mention that SuperH and IA-64 can now build a minimalist C-only toolchain, so the support for these architectures is not complete yet, but progressing. Of course, most components have been updated: new versions, new features, updated patchsets, etc. It for example include support for the latest version of uClibc, 0.9.30, released only two weeks ago.

The Changelog is available, as is a tarball of the new release.

If you need to build some cross-compiling toolchain, you definitely should take a look at Crosstool-ng. It’s great, and well supported: Yann is both very responsive and very helpful when problems are being reported.