How is the minimum glibc for Android NDK and platform tools decided?

[John Dallman]

I do all my Android work on Linux, using the NDK and the platform
tools. They are pleasantly portable between different Linuxes,
apparently depending only on the glibc version on the Linux host.

I fully understand that Android NDK code uses Bionic libc, not glibc.
My interest in glibc is purely about the possible need to upgrade the
Linux on my development host to be compatible with future releases of
the NDK and the platform tools. Glibc has very strong compatibility
guarantees: anything linked against an older glibc on the same
platform will run with a newer glibc.

Because Google uses Ubuntu, and I'm in an RHEL/Rocky/Alma shop, I'd
like to know how it's decided what glibc the NDK tools should require.

At present, I'm using Rocky 8.10. which has glibc 2.28. NDK27 and
platform tools 34.0.4 run happily, and the latest glibc requirement
I've found among them is glibc 2.16. Since that doesn't match a
historical Ubuntu, it seemed worth asking how this is decided?

Thanks in advance,

John

[enh]

TL;DR: we have no current plans to move to a newer glibc.

basically we have to balance "is this genuinely useful to us?" against
"how much of a PITA is this going to be for users, many of whom are
running in VMs or on boxes that someone else set up a decade ago".
iirc the current version started out as an attempt to go to 2.17 or
2.18 that was bargained back down.

ideally we'd switch to musl (and then we'd be able to statically link,
for an even better experience) but things like gpu drivers for
cuttlefish have got in the way of that so far...

> --
> You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "android-ndk" group.
> To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to android-ndk...@googlegroups.com.
> To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/android-ndk/CAH1xqgnWa12-C23r9YeVX5Br%2BWsc8WBJ5a0EKX9f96UyWJfMhA%40mail.gmail.com.

[John Dallman]

Thanks, that answers all my questions.

John

> To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/android-ndk/CAJgzZoqgemqqjHRn7%2B9R_EtxNv-Dad3JXS36AV-kK5Mrr-wYzg%40mail.gmail.com.