Glibc installation Before starting to install Glibc, you must cd into the glibc-&glibc-version; directory and unpack Glibc-linuxthreads in that directory, not in /usr/src as you would normally do. We are going to run the test suite for Glibc in this chapter. However, it's worth pointing out that the Glibc test suite we run in this section is considered not as important as the one we run in Chapter 6. This package is known to behave badly when you have changed its default optimization flags (including the -march and -mcpu options). Therefore, if you have defined any environment variables that override default optimizations, such as CFLAGS and CXXFLAGS, we recommend unsetting them when building Glibc. Basically, compiling Glibc in any other way than the book suggests is putting the stability of your system at risk. Though it is a harmless message, the install stage of Glibc will complain about the absence of /tools/etc/ld.so.conf. Fix this annoying little error with: mkdir /tools/etc touch /tools/etc/ld.so.conf Also, Glibc has a subtle problem when compiled with GCC 3.3.1. Apply the following patch to fix this: patch -Np1 -i ../glibc-&glibc-sscanf-patch-version;.patch The Glibc documentation recommends building Glibc outside of the source directory in a dedicated build directory: mkdir ../glibc-build cd ../glibc-build Next, prepare Glibc to be compiled: ../glibc-&glibc-version;/configure --prefix=/tools \     --disable-profile --enable-add-ons \     --with-headers=/tools/include \     --with-binutils=/tools/bin \     --without-gd The meaning of the configure options: --disable-profile: This disables the building of the libraries with profiling information. Omit this option if you plan to do profiling. --enable-add-ons: This enables any add-ons that were installed with Glibc, in our case Linuxthreads. --with-binutils=/tools/bin and --with-headers=/tools/include: Strictly speaking these switches are not required. But they ensure nothing can go wrong with regard to what kernel headers and Binutils programs get used during the Glibc build. --without-gd: This switch ensures that we don't build the memusagestat program, which strangely enough insists on linking against the host's libraries (libgd, libpng, libz, and so forth). During this stage you might see the following warning:
configure: WARNING: *** These auxiliary programs are missing or incompatible versions: msgfmt *** some features will be disabled. *** Check the INSTALL file for required versions.
The missing or incompatible msgfmt program is generally harmless and shouldn't cause us any problems. Continue with compiling the package: make make check make install The glibc make check process is highly dependent on certain functions of your host operating system. The most common is a host that fails to mount a tmpfs filesystem at /dev/shm, which may cause glibc tests to fail. The locales (used by Glibc to make your Linux system respond in a different language) weren't installed when you ran the previous command, so we have to do that ourselves now: make localedata/install-locales An alternative to running the previous command is to install only those locales which you need or want. This can be achieved by using the localedef command. Information on this can be found in the INSTALL file in the glibc-&glibc-version; tree. However, there are a number of locales that are essential for the tests of future packages to pass correctly, in particular, the libstdc++ tests from GCC. The following instructions, in place of the install-locales command above, will install the minimum set of locales necessary for the tests to run successfully: mkdir -p /tools/lib/locale localedef -i de_DE -f ISO-8859-1 de_DE localedef -i de_DE@euro -f ISO-8859-15 de_DE@euro localedef -i en_HK -f ISO-8859-1 en_HK localedef -i en_PH -f ISO-8859-1 en_PH localedef -i en_US -f ISO-8859-1 en_US localedef -i es_MX -f ISO-8859-1 es_MX localedef -i fr_FR -f ISO-8859-1 fr_FR localedef -i fr_FR@euro -f ISO-8859-15 fr_FR@euro localedef -i it_IT -f ISO-8859-1 it_IT localedef -i ja_JP -f EUC-JP ja_JP