http://www.gnu.org/software/libc/

Sources

For concenience, we maintain our own source repository.

Specifics

Ports

Porting glibc to a specific architecture is non-trivial.

The main port is x86, which is somewhat complete and is maintained. We are actively stabilizing the X86 64 port. There were incomplete ports for Alpha, MIPS, and PowerPC, but they were unmaintained and have been removed.

Hurd-specific Port

An important part of the Hurd actually resides in glibc: here, the system interfaces are implemented on top of the Hurd IPC protocols. This is different to the Linux port, where most simple system interfaces are in fact simply forwarded to/implemented as system calls.

Maintenance

Implementation Details

• Hurd-specific API

• secure file descriptor handling

• signal thread

• startup

• error-reporting

Concepts

• environment variable

• file descriptor

• process

• signal

• ioctl

Individual functions

Some of these are well-known as UNIX system calls.

• fallocate

• fork

• mmap

• poll

Debugging

Some hints for debugging.

Open Issues

There is a FOSS Factory bounty (p269) on some glibc tasks.