README 2.6 KB

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  1. uClibc - a Small C Library for Linux
  2. Erik Andersen <andersen@codepoet.org>
  3. uClibc (aka µClibc/pronounced yew-see-lib-see) is a C library for
  4. developing embedded Linux systems. It is much smaller than the
  5. GNU C Library, but nearly all applications supported by glibc
  6. also work perfectly with uClibc. Porting applications from glibc
  7. to uClibc typically involves just recompiling the source code.
  8. uClibc even supports shared libraries and threading. It currently
  9. runs on standard Linux and MMU-less (also known as µClinux)
  10. systems with support for alpha, ARM, i386, i960, h8300, m68k,
  11. mips/mipsel, PowerPC, SH, SPARC, and v850 processors.
  12. If you are building an embedded Linux system and you find that
  13. glibc is eating up too much space, you should consider using
  14. uClibc. If you are building a huge fileserver with 12 Terabytes
  15. of storage, then using glibc may be a better choice...
  16. uClibc is maintained by Erik Andersen and is licensed under the
  17. GNU LIBRARY GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE . This license allows you to
  18. make closed source commercial applications using uClibc (Please
  19. consider sharing some of the money you make ;-). You do not need
  20. to give away all your source code just because you use uClibc
  21. and/or run on Linux.
  22. For installation instructions, see the file INSTALL.
  23. This distribution contains a wrapper for gcc and ld that allows you
  24. to use existing toolchains that were targetted for glibc. See
  25. extra/gcc-uClibc/ for information.
  26. uClibc strives to be standards compliant, which means that most
  27. documentation written for functions in glibc also applies to uClibc
  28. functions. However, many GNU extensions are not supported because
  29. they have not been ported, or more importantly, would increase the
  30. size of uClibc disproportional to the added functionality.
  31. Additional information (recent releases, FAQ, mailing list, bugs,
  32. etc.) can be found at http://www.uclibc.org/.
  33. uClibc may be freely modified distributed under the terms of the
  34. GNU Library General Public License, which can be found in the
  35. file COPYING.LIB.
  36. Please Note:
  37. There is an unwholesomely huge amount of code out there
  38. that depends on the presence of GNU libc header files.
  39. We have GNU libc header files. So we have committed a
  40. horrible sin in uClibc. We _lie_ and claim to be GNU
  41. libc in order to force these applications to work as their
  42. developers intended. This is IMHO, pardonable, since
  43. these defines are not really intended to check for the
  44. presence of a particular library, but rather are used to
  45. define an _interface_. Some programs are especially
  46. chummy with glibc, and may need this behavior disabled
  47. by adding CFLAGS+=-D__FORCE_NOGLIBC