uClibc - a Small C Library for Linux Erik Andersen <andersen@codepoet.org> uClibc (aka �Clibc/pronounced yew-see-lib-see) is a C library for developing embedded Linux systems. It is much smaller than the GNU C Library, but nearly all applications supported by glibc also work perfectly with uClibc. Porting applications from glibc to uClibc typically involves just recompiling the source code. uClibc even supports shared libraries and threading. It currently runs on standard Linux and MMU-less (also known as �Clinux) systems with support for alpha, ARM, i386, i960, h8300, m68k, mips/mipsel, PowerPC, SH, SPARC, and v850 processors. If you are building an embedded Linux system and you find that glibc is eating up too much space, you should consider using uClibc. If you are building a huge fileserver with 12 Terabytes of storage, then using glibc may be a better choice... uClibc is maintained by Erik Andersen and is licensed under the GNU LIBRARY GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE . This license allows you to make closed source commercial applications using uClibc (Please consider sharing some of the money you make ;-). You do not need to give away all your source code just because you use uClibc and/or run on Linux. For installation instructions, see the file INSTALL. This distribution contains a wrapper for gcc and ld that allows you to use existing toolchains that were targetted for glibc. See extra/gcc-uClibc/ for information. uClibc strives to be standards compliant, which means that most documentation written for functions in glibc also applies to uClibc functions. However, many GNU extensions are not supported because they have not been ported, or more importantly, would increase the size of uClibc disproportional to the added functionality. Additional information (recent releases, FAQ, mailing list, bugs, etc.) can be found at http://www.uclibc.org/. uClibc may be freely modified distributed under the terms of the GNU Library General Public License, which can be found in the file COPYING.LIB. Please Note: There is an unwholesomely huge amount of code out there that depends on the presence of GNU libc header files. We have GNU libc header files. So we have committed a horrible sin in uClibc. We _lie_ and claim to be GNU libc in order to force these applications to work as their developers intended. This is IMHO, pardonable, since these defines are not really intended to check for the presence of a particular library, but rather are used to define an _interface_. Some programs (such as GNU binutils) are especially chummy with glibc, and may need this behavior disabled by adding CFLAGS+=-D__FORCE_NOGLIBC