171–180 of 493 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's really just glibc
It's really just not. GTK is on its fourth major version. Wayland broke backwards compatibility with tons of apps.
This might offend some people but even Linus Torvalds thinks that the ABI compatibility is not good enough in Linux distros, and this is one of the main reasons Linux is not popular on the desktop. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5PmHRSeA2c8&t=283s
To be honest, I think OSes are boring, and should have been that way since maybe 1995. The basic notions:
multi-processing, context switching, tree-like file systems, multiple users, access privileges,
tree-like file systems, WIMP GUIs, per-user privileges, the fuzziness of what an
"operating system" even is and its role,
ZFS (which implements in a very well-engineered manner a tree-like data storage that's
been standard since the '60s) can serve as a founation for
Postgres (which implements a better-conceived relational design)
anarchy of packaging systems, breaking upgrades and updates,
unstable glibc, desktop environments that are different and changing seemingly
for the sake of it, sound that's kept breaking, power management iffiness, etc.This might offend some people but even Linus Torvalds thinks that the ABI compatibility is not good enough in Linux distros, and this is one of the main reasons Linux is not popular on the desktop. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5PmHRSeA2c8&t=283s
To quote a friend; "Glibc is a waste of a perfectly good stable kernel ABI"
Linux with glibc is the complete opposite; there really does exist old Linux software that static-links in everything down to libc, just interacting with the kernel through syscalls—and it does (almost always) still work to run such software on a modern Linux, even when the software is 10-20 years old.
I guess this is why Linux containers are such a thing: you’re taking a dynamically-linked Linux binary and pinning it to a particular entire userland, such that when you run the old software, it calls into the old glibc. Containers work, because they ultimately ground out in the same set of stable kernel ABI calls.
(Which, now that I think of it, makes me wonder how exactly Windows containers work. I’m guessing each one brings its own NTOSKRNL, that gets spun up under HyperV if the host kernel ABI doesn’t match the guest?)
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To quote a friend; "Glibc is a waste of a perfectly good stable kernel ABI"
At least glibc uses versioned symbols. Hundreds of other widely-used open source libraries don't.
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I agree 100% with Linus. I can run a WinXP exe on Win10 or 11 almost every time, but on Linux I often have to chase down versions that still work with the latest Mint or Ubuntu distros. Stuff that worked before just breaks, especially if the app isn’t in the repo.
That’s actually an intentional nudge to make the software packaged by the distro, which usually implies that they are open source. Who needs ABI compatibility when your software is OSS? You only need API compatibility at that point.
This might offend some people but even Linus Torvalds thinks that the ABI compatibility is not good enough in Linux distros, and this is one of the main reasons Linux is not popular on the desktop. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5PmHRSeA2c8&t=283s
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Can't we just freeze glibc, at least from an API version perspective?
The problem is not the APIs, it's symbol versions. You will routinely get loader errors when running software compiled against a newer glibc than what a system provides, even if the caller does not use any "new" APIs. glibc-based toolchains are ultimately missing a GLIBC_MIN_DEPLOYMENT_TARGET definition that gets passed to the linker so it knows which minimum version of glibc your software supports, similar to how Ap…
patchelf --set-interpreter /lib/ld-linux-x86-64.so.2 "$APP"
patchelf --set-rpath /lib "$APP"Can somebody explain: 1. The exact problem with the Linux ABI 2. What causes it (the issues that makes it such a challenge) 3. How it changed over the years, and its current state 4. Any serious attempts to resolve it I've been on Linux for may be 2 decades at this point. I haven't noticed any issues with ABI so far, perhaps because I use everything from the distro repo or build and install them using the package man…
The model of patching+recompiling the world for every OS release is a terrible hack that devs hate and that users hate. 99% of all people hate it because it's a crap model. Devs hate middlemen who silently fuck up their software and leave upstream with the mess, users hate being restricted to whatever software was cool and current two years ago. If they use a rolling distro, they hate the constant brokenness that com…
Never happens for me on Arch, which I've run as my primary desktop for 15 years.