[Vm-dev] libc6 requirements for Linux VM

David T. Lewis lewis at mail.msen.com
Fri Oct 15 21:39:02 UTC 2010


On Fri, Oct 15, 2010 at 11:09:36PM +0530, K. K. Subramaniam wrote:
>  
> Hi,
> 
> This is continuation of a discussion at etoys-dev
>  http://lists.squeakland.org/pipermail/etoys-dev/2010-October/005949.html
> 
> Essentially, 4.x Linux VMs may fail with an error:
>   
> Could not load library: /lib/libc.so.6: version `GLIBC_2.7' not found
> 
> This is due to their dependency on libc6-2.7 or later. This version shipped in 
> Ubuntu 8.04+ and kernels 2.6.24+. Machines with 256MB RAM running perfectly 
> well on Ubuntu 7.10 became terribly slow when upgraded to 8.04 (google for 
> "ubuntu hardy slow"). Linux kernel degraded poorly when faced with memory 
> pressure caused by increased working set of 8.04. People with 256MB RAM 
> systems (e.g. schools) could not upgrade to distros with libc6 v2.7+ without 
> upgrading their hardware.
> 
> XOs have 256MB RAMs and so do virtual machines that run in qemu or kvm. So the 
> increased requirement may affect these deployments.
> 
> Has anyone faced this issue in Squeak v4.1 on production machines?

Well I certainly noticed this on my own old laptop (but I compile my
own VM's and did not pay much attention to it). Certainly we should
find a way to continue providing working VMs for XOs and for older
PCs in schools.

A couple of questions to clarify the issue:

For XOs and for all Etoys users, the images are not closure enabled,
and therefore only the traditional interpreter VM (not Cog) is an
issue at this time. Thus for the next round of VMs to be released
(timing aligned with Squeak 4.2 release), there is no need to provide
a Linux Cog VM compiled with the older libraries. Is this correct?

I know that there is an Etoys release being prepared right now. What
is the timeline for finding a solution to this issue?

Thanks for bringing this up.

Dave



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