Status of the Native Client port of glibc

Status of the Native Client port of glibc

[Florian Weimer]

Hi Roland,

the nacl-glibc repository at

   https://chromium.googlesource.com/native_client/nacl-glibc/

contains quite a few changes not in glibc master.  Some of the changes 
found there are impossible to apply to glibc master as-is due to the way 
they change generic files (like the changes to elf/Versions for IRT 
support).

I'm wondering what your plans are going forward.  Are there any users 
left of the upstream glibc port?

Thanks,
Florian

Re: Status of the Native Client port of glibc

[Roland McGrath]

> the nacl-glibc repository at
> 
>    https://chromium.googlesource.com/native_client/nacl-glibc/
> 
> contains quite a few changes not in glibc master.  Some of the changes 
> found there are impossible to apply to glibc master as-is due to the way 
> they change generic files (like the changes to elf/Versions for IRT 
> support).

You're looking at the wrong branch.  'master' in that repository is an
ancient hacky port that was never meant to be upstreamed (it was done
before I got involved in Native Client).

'ng/master' and 'ng/2.NN/master' are the branches I was using for the
clean port.  I managed to keep everything upstream along the way, so
those branches are just (manually-maintained) mirrors of upstream
'master' and 'release/2.NN/master', respectively.

> I'm wondering what your plans are going forward.  Are there any users 
> left of the upstream glibc port?

I have changed projects at Google and no longer work on Native Client.
AFAIK it's in mature maintenance mode and will be for the foreseeable
future (all of Native Client, not just the glibc port), but I'm not an
authoritative source on such plans.  The NaCl SDK is still shipping
arm-nacl glibc from the 2.23 release.  I don't know concretely how many
users of arm-nacl glibc there actually are, but I assume there are
still some.

I've CC'd Brad, who is in charge of Native Client overall now.  I think
he and Sam are the people most likely to touch this in the near future.

I've just tried building arm-nacl glibc from the tip of the 2.24
release branch (now also ng/2.24/master in the above chromium repo).
It has a couple of trivial build errors that have simple and obvious
fixes.  I'm pushing these fixes to trunk and 2.24 now.  With that, it
builds out of the box.  But Brad et al will have to decide if they want
to do any actual testing and deploy it for the NaCl SDK.


Thanks,
Roland