Skip to content

Homebrew/glibc-bootstrap

glibc-bootstrap

Bootstrap binaries for compiling glibc from source.

Requirements

To run the binaries built by this workflow:

Linux with glibc 2.13 or newer.

x86-64 CPU architecture with support for -march=core2 (defined here).

To build the binaries:

A host machine capable of running building and running Linux x86-64 Docker images.

Installation

The bootstrap binaries are downloaded automatically when building the glibc formula from source. This will happen if the user is in a non-default prefix and has a host glibc that is older than the one in our CI image we use to build bottles on Linux.

Building binaries outside of GitHub Actions

GitHub Actions is used to build the binaries in CI. To build them locally:

# Clone the repository
git clone https://github.com/Homebrew/glibc-bootstrap
cd glibc-bootstrap

# Build the Docker image.
docker build --tag debian7 debian7

# Start the Docker image and leave it running the background so the binaries
# can easily be copied out after they are built.
docker run --rm --detach --user linuxbrew --name debian7 \
  --workdir /home/linuxbrew --volume $(pwd):/home/linuxbrew/glibc-bootstrap debian7 sleep inf

# Call a build-*.sh script to build a specific binary.  We use build-make.sh as an example.
docker exec debian7 /bin/bash -c "/home/linuxbrew/glibc-bootstrap/build-make.sh"

# Copy the binaries out of the container after they have been compiled.
docker cp debian7:/home/linuxbrew/bootstrap-binaries .

Motivation

The glibc bottle is not relocatable and must be built from source if the user is in a non-default prefix. While glibc has no runtime dependencies, it does have build dependencies which may be too new or unavailable to users without root access. Rather than requiring the user to build these dependencies from source, we build them with GitHub Actions in this repository using a Linux image with an older version of glibc and a prefix of /tmp/homebrew. Assuming the user has write access to /tmp, this approach guarantees that all users on actively maintained versions of glibc (2.17 or newer) can install and run these binaries. The build dependency binaries are installed as resources to /tmp/homebrew and used to build glibc instead of the host toolchain.

Copyright

Copyright (c) Homebrew maintainers. See LICENSE.txt for details.