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.