Toolchain for older glibc version

[Evador]

I have an application which runs on 2 different systems: Ubuntu 24.04 and Amazon Linux 2023. I do my builds on Ubuntu 24.04.
The problem I am facing is that Amazon Linux 2023 (with all upgrades) has too old libc/libstdc++ versions: 2.34/3.4.29 against 2.38/3.4.30 required on Ubuntu 24.04. I tried to install libgcc-11-dev/libstdc++-11-dev and build with xmake f --toolchain=gcc-11 -c but the binary seems still to be linked against newer (system) version of libgcc/libstdc++.

Does anyone know what's the right way to make builds in such scenario?

[star-hengxing]

The libgcc-11-dev/libstdc++-11-dev packages still link to the host Linux's glibc.
There are two existing approaches to resolve this issue: using manylinux or zig.

[Evador]

Could you please help me with exact steps I should take, I still struggle here. Are there any doc pointers for the first approach?

I tried to do it similarly to the action workflow like this:

xrepo install -y zig
xrepo env -b zig xmake f --embed=y --toolchain=zig --cross=x86_64-linux-gnu.2.29 -c

Here I've got:

error: Invalid option: --embed=y
error: execv(xmake f --embed=y --toolchain=zig --cross=x86_64-linux-gnu.2.29 -c) failed(255)

And indeed I can't find embed option in xmake (v2.9.8+HEAD.13fc392).

If I try it without embed option I'm getting an error installing one of dependencies of my project (libaio coming from folly):

xrepo env -b zig xmake f --toolchain=zig --cross=x86_64-linux-gnu.2.29 -c

cc -target x86_64-linux-gnu.2.29 -Wall -I. -fPIC -c -o io_queue_init.ol io_queue_init.c
cc: error: unrecognized command-line option ‘-target’

$ cc --version
cc (Ubuntu 13.3.0-6ubuntu2~24.04) 13.3.0
Copyright (C) 2023 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
This is free software; see the source for copying conditions.  There is NO
warranty; not even for MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.

[star-hengxing]

This issue serves as a reference example, you don't need to execute the full commands.

Unless your project is very simple (pure c code or c++ & libc++, and dependencies can also be built with xmake), I wouldn't recommend using zig for building.

[Evador]

Could you please share any examples (if you have any) I still can't figure out a way to do so

[star-hengxing]

Aside from using zig to build xamke, I don’t have other practical examples.

The principle of glibc compatibility is straightforward: use a lower version of glibc combined with a higher-version toolchain to build the project. The manylinux project provides such a docker environment for this purpose.

zig provides symbol tables for every version of glibc. This allows linking against any glibc version in any environment.

However, zig defaults to using libc++, and using libstdc++ is more cumbersome.

How to use another C++ ABI?

Here’s my example using MSYS2 + MinGW64 + libstdc++.

If your project depends on other libraries, I cannot guarantee that all cmake packages will work with zig builds.