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uClibc -- a C library for embedded systems
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uClibc (aka µClibc/pronounced
yew-see-lib-see) is a C library for developing embedded Linux systems.
It is much smaller than the
GNU C Library,
but nearly all applications supported by glibc also work perfectly with
uClibc. Porting applications from glibc to uClibc typically involves
just recompiling the source code. uClibc even supports shared libraries
and threading. It currently runs on standard Linux
and MMU-less (also known as µClinux)
systems with support for alpha, ARM, cris, i386, i960, h8300, m68k, mips/mipsel,
PowerPC, SH, SPARC, and v850 processors.
If you are building an embedded Linux system and you find that
glibc is eating up too much space, you should consider using
uClibc. If you are building a huge fileserver with 12 Terabytes
of storage, then using glibc may make more sense. Unless, for
example, that 12 Terabytes will be Network Attached Storage and
you plan to burn Linux into the system's firmware...
uClibc is maintained by
Erik Andersen
and is licensed under the
GNU LIBRARY GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE
. This license allows you to make closed source commercial applications using
uClibc (Please consider sharing some of the money you make ;-). You do not need
to give away all your source code just because you use uClibc and/or run on Linux.
Mailing List Information
uClibc has a mailing list.
To subscribe, go and visit
this page.
Frequently Asked Questions
Before asking questions on the uClibc mailing list,
you might want to take a look at the
list of Frequently Asked Questions
or
you might want to search the mailing list archives...
Working Applications List
These days, pretty much everything compiles with uClibc. This
is a list of applications that are known
to work just fine with uClibc. Since most applications work just
fine with uClibc, we are especially interested in knowing about any
applications that either do not compile or do not work
properly with uClibc. Submissions are welcome!
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Latest News
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- 8 November 2003, uClibc 0.9.22 Released
CodePoet Consulting is pleased to announce the immediate availability of
uClibc 0.9.22. This release has been cooking for a couple of months now
and is looking quite solid. We have done quite a lot of testing with this
release and things are looking good. And Erik has built Debian stable
(woody) for x86 with uClibc and it runs great. Expect that to be released
in the next few days.
This release is binary compatible with uClibc 0.9.21 -- as long as you pick
compatible configuration options. Enabling or disabling things like
soft-float, locale, wide char support, or changing cpu optimizations are
all good examples of binary incompatible configuration options. If have
changed any of those sorts of options (or if you are not sure!) you will
need to recompile all your applications and libraries.
Updated uClibc development systems using uClibc 0.9.22 will be made
available within a few days. Meanwhile, we invite you to try out uClibc
with the latest Linux Test Project
test suite (you will need to apply a small patch.
And also give the latest Perl and Python test suites a try as well.
If you find any bugs in uClibc, PLEASE let us know!
As usual, the
Changelog,
detailed changelog,
and source code for this release
are available here.
- 30 September 2003, dev systems updated to uClibc 0.9.21+
The uClibc development systems for
i386,
powerpc,
arm,
mips,
have been updated to uClibc 0.9.21 (plus all the CVS updates up to
today). Several problems have been fixed up,
gcc has been updated to version 3.3.1, binutils was updated to 2.14.90.0.6, and
tada everything finally works for cross compiling. These were
all cross compiled (which really makes things faster since the older
mipsel releases used to take 2 days to build!)
These are ~100 MB ext2 filesystems that run natively on the specified
architecture. They contains all the development software you need to build
your own uClibc applications, including bash, coreutils, findutils,
diffutils, patch, sed, ed, flex, bison, file, gawk, tar, grep gdb, strace,
make, gcc, g++, autoconf, automake, ncurses, zlib, openssl, openssh perl,
and more. And of course, everything is dynamically linked against uClibc.
By using a uClibc only system, you can avoid all the painful
cross-configuration problems that have made using uClibc somewhat painful
in the past. If you want to quickly get started with testing or using
uClibc you should give these images a try. You can loop mount and them
you can chroot into them, you can boot into with using user-mode Linux,
and you can even 'dd' them to a spare partition and use resize2fs to make
them fill the drive. Whatever works for you.
If you would like to build your own custom uClibc system, you can
use buildroot, which is
how these uClibc development systems were created.
- Old News
Click here to read older news.
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Sponsors
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Please visit our sponsors and thank them for their support! They have
provided money, equipment, bandwidth, etc. Next time you need help with a
project, consider these fine companies! Several individuals have also
contributed (If you have contributed and would like your name added here,
just email Erik and let him know).
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Do you like uClibc? Do you need support? Do you need some features
added? Then why not help out? We are happy to accept donations
(such as bandwidth, mirrors sites, and hardware for the various
architectures). We can also provide support contracts, and implement
funded feature requests. To contribute, you can either click on the
Donate image to donate using PayPal, or you can contact Erik at
CodePoet Consulting
(we have a credit card machine so you can avoid PayPal if you wish).
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Download
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Toolchains
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- Steven J. Hill has kindly provided
RPMs and SRPMs
with toolchains for mips.
- You can build your own
uClibc toolchain
using these Makefiles which automagically download all the source
needed code and compile it for you.
- uClibc development systems for
i386
and
powerpc,
and
arm
are available and contain complete gcc 3.2.2 toolchains.
- You can compile your own uClibc development system using
buildroot.
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Other Open Source C libraries:
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I am currently aware of the following open source C libraries.
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