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Introduction

glibc is GNU's implementation of:

  • libc. By far the most popular implementation on Linux.
  • POSIX C API
  • glibc extensions such as interfaces to system calls
  • the dynamic loader ldd and helpers like ldconfig

glibc also includes:

  • crtX.o files which GCC links against

glibc does not contain:

  • a few stdlib headers which are provided by GCC, e.g. gcc/ginclude/stddef.h and stdint-gcc.h. Those contains parameters which depend on the compiler, e.g. the largest integer type supported.

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

Documentation: http://www.gnu.org/software/libc/manual/html_mono/libc.html

This shall only document GNU extensions to libc in its implementation called glibc.

Extensions which are very thin interfaces to system calls will be documented together with system calls and not here.

POSIX C API shall not be discussed, only points which are specific to glibc shall be discussed here.

glibc does not necessarily come with GCC, the compiler: you could in theory choose between different implementations.

In Ubuntu 14.04:

  • headers for glibc are on /usr/include, e.g. /usr/include/stdio.h. Try: locate /stdio.h
  • lib for glibc are on /usr/lib/i386-linux-gnu. Try: locate libc.so. I have two libc.so:
    • /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libc.so.6 from libc6 package, which is used by other packages. The packages does not contain headers. This is the actual library.
    • /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libc.so from the libc6-dev package, which is used by things you compile yourself. The package also contains headers. This is not a library, but a linker script: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/13790973/libc-so-in-several-locations. This file is generated by the glibc build itself.
  • the Ubuntu package that contains it is called libc6-dev. See it with: apt-file search
  • libc-bin contains some utilities present in the glibc source tree like ldd, ldconfig and iconv

Find glibc version

libc.so.6 is executable!

/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libc.so.6

Sample output:

GNU C Library (Ubuntu EGLIBC 2.19-0ubuntu6.6) stable release version 2.19, by Roland McGrath et al.
Copyright (C) 2014 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.
Compiled by GNU CC version 4.8.2.
Compiled on a Linux 3.13.11 system on 2015-02-25.
Available extensions:
    crypt add-on version 2.1 by Michael Glad and others
    GNU Libidn by Simon Josefsson
    Native POSIX Threads Library by Ulrich Drepper et al
    BIND-8.2.3-T5B
libc ABIs: UNIQUE IFUNC
For bug reporting instructions, please see:
<https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/eglibc/+bugs>.

Alternatively:

./gnu_get_libc_version.out

LSB

Linux standard base seems to require only the two following gnu extensions to be available:

  • gnu_get_libc_version() returns a string that identifies the version of the C library running the program making the call.
  • gnu_get_libc_release()

All the other functions seem to be present on all Linux distros only because glibc is a de-facto standard. TODO any others?