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. There is an incomplete and unmaintained port for PowerPC. There have been incomplete and largely unmaintained ports for Alpha and MIPS in glibc-ports.

Hurd-specific Port

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

Maintenance

Implementation Details

• Hurd-specific API

• secure file descriptor handling

• signal thread

• startup

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.