Sunday, October 30, 2022

[SOLVED] gcc, cross-compilation, sysroot and glibc nightmare

Issue

I'm developing and building applications for a various amount of platforms (linux x86, x86_64, arm, aarch64, sparc64, mips, powerpc, macos x86_64, freebsd x86_64, solaris x86_64 and of course Windows) and I was using a very old linux box (2014 Ubuntu) for all this cross-compilation.

I've recently decided that it was more than time to move to a more updated build environment as many tools were obsolete and could not be updated, so I've moved everything to a Ubuntu 22.04. All worked fine but then I hit the "glibc version hell" when I tried to run that on other boxes as glibc on that buildbox is 2.35.

So I've tried to get older glibc to compile and link against these as I'd really like to avoid linking everything static. But now, all the gcc that are build with Ubuntu have been with a "--with-sysroot=/" which, AFAII means I can't do anything. The --sysroot option is ignored by gcc which uses / for sysroot, no matter what.

I've seen a few answers saying "use old box to build" and that seems really insane to me. On my Mac or Windows, I can chose minimum (old) target platform, even if I build on W11 or Monterey. And obviously, the reason WHY I move to a new buildbox is to NOT use an old one and be stuck with obsolete tools :-).

I can probably use again ct-ng and rebuild all compilers, including native ones, but that seems really an overkill. Anybody with a better solution?

Thanks!


Solution

Seems that there is really no solution for what I'm looking for. I ended up almost re-inventing the wheel while trying to manually installing glibc. It was a faster option to use ct-ng and install cross-compilers from there, not using the stock ones provides with my distro.



Answered By - philippe_44
Answer Checked By - Timothy Miller (WPSolving Admin)