musl build ?

[colindaven]

Hi,

I've had problems just running the downloaded binaries because of GLIBC issues.

Would a musl build be possible with something like this ?

Thanks

Add the target:


rustup target add x86_64-unknown-linux-musl

Build:


cargo build --release --target x86_64-unknown-linux-musl

[colindaven]

I've got it working now by compiling in a ubuntu 2404 container with the rust toolchain installed, so perhaps disregard.

[ewels]

Thanks for the report!

A proper musl static build is a bit awkward here because we compile a small C++ shim (cpp/rng_shim.cpp) so that our preseq bootstrap produces byte-identical results to upstream preseq. Cross-compiling C++ to musl from Ubuntu doesn't work out of the box, and the standard workaround (cargo-zigbuild) uses libc++ instead of libstdc++, which would silently change the binomial distribution algorithm and diverge from the existing builds.

The simpler fix is to lower the glibc baseline of our existing Linux release builds. Right now they're built on ubuntu-latest (glibc 2.39), which won't run on anything older. Switching to ubuntu-22.04 would target glibc 2.35, which covers Ubuntu 22.04+, Debian 12+, RHEL/Rocky 9+, Fedora 36+, and most active HPC environments.

Could you let me know what system you're hitting this on, and which glibc version it has? You can check with ldd --version. If you're on glibc 2.35 or newer, the baseline change will fix it. If you're on something older (CentOS 7, RHEL 8, Ubuntu 20.04), then a real musl build is the only option and I'll look at that as a separate piece of work.

[colindaven]

Although I still have a few Ubuntu 20.04 systems in dire need of an upgrade, I think it makes more sense to cover systems and containers with 22.04+ glibc 2.35.

If musl would be a problem then I would not try to cover it.

Thanks!

[ewels]

Ok, so to confirm: you think #102 will solve your issue and we should go ahead with it?

[colindaven]

Yes, exactly - thanks !