GNU C library

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Glibc is the GNU project's C standard library. It is free software and is available under the GNU Lesser General Public License. The lead contributor and maintainer is Ulrich Drepper.

In addition to providing the functionality required by Unix98, Single UNIX Specification, POSIX (1c, 1d, and 1j) and some of the functionality required by ISO C99, Glibc also provides extensions which have been deemed useful or necessary while developing the GNU operating system.

Glibc is used in systems which run many different kernels and different hardware architectures. Its most common use is in GNU/Linux systems on x86 hardware, but officially supported hardware includes: x86, Motorola 680x0, DEC Alpha, PowerPC, ARM, ETRAX CRIS, MIPS, s390, and SPARC. It officially supports the Hurd and Linux kernels, although there are heavily patched versions that run on the kernels of FreeBSD and NetBSD (from which GNU/kFreeBSD and GNU/kNetBSD systems are built, respectively). It is also used (in an edited form) as the libroot of BeOS and hence Haiku.

Glibc version 2 has been referred to by Linux users as libc6, because it replaced the older Linux C library, which was itself a fork of a much earlier glibc and used versions 2 through 5. This name is less common nowadays; however, glibc on Linux systems still uses the soname libc.so.6 and some packaging systems still call it libc6 (especially those that follow the convention that a new soname means a new package name).

External links

redirect[[Template:Portal]]

[Glibc homepage]
[Manual]
[Fear of forking], an essay by Rick Moen, with a discussion of glibc, libc5, and libc6 in section 6

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