How can I link to a specific glibc version?

Question

When I compile something on my Ubuntu Lucid 10.04 PC it gets linked against glibc. Lucid uses 2.11 of glibc. When I run this binary on another PC with an older glibc, the command fails saying there's no glibc 2.11...

As far as I know glibc uses symbol versioning. Can I force gcc to link against a specific symbol version?

In my concrete use I try to compile a gcc cross toolchain for ARM.

Answer 1

You are correct in that glibc uses symbol versioning. If you are curious, the symbol versioning implementation introduced in glibc 2.1 is described here and is an extension of Sun's symbol versioning scheme described here.

One option is to statically link your binary. This is probably the easiest option.

You could also build your binary in a chroot build environment, or using a glibc-new => glibc-old cross-compiler.

According to the http://www.trevorpounds.com blog post Linking to Older Versioned Symbols (glibc), it is possible to to force any symbol to be linked against an older one so long as it is valid by using the same .symver pseudo-op that is used for defining versioned symbols in the first place. The following example is excerpted from the blog post.

The following example makes use of glibc’s realpath, but makes sure it is linked against an older 2.2.5 version.

#include <limits.h>
#include <stdlib.h>
#include <stdio.h>

__asm__(".symver realpath,realpath@GLIBC_2.2.5");
int main()
{
    const char* unresolved = "/lib64";
    char resolved[PATH_MAX+1];

    if(!realpath(unresolved, resolved))
        { return 1; }

    printf("%s\n", resolved);

    return 0;
}