maria-developers team mailing list archive

[Kristian Nielsen <knielsen@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Michael Widenius <michael.widenius@xxxxxxxxx> writes:

> Hi!
>
>>>>>> "Kristian" == Kristian Nielsen <knielsen@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes:
>
> <cut>
>
> Kristian> I am still not sure whether generic (.tar.gz) binaries should be build
> Kristian> statically (and to what extend).
>
> The benefit of building them staticly are:

Unfortunately, the issue is more complex than just this. A fully static binary
will not work at all in a number of scenarios.

A fully static binary is obtained by linking everything statically, including
libc. However, linking libc statically creates a number of problems if mysqld
tries to load additional .so files when it is run. The additional .so files
then use a different version of libc than the one mysqld code uses, which does
not work. This gives problem loading plugins (like UDFs), and on many systems
causes problems even without loading any plugins, as libc loads .so files
itself (notably for NSS, domain name resolution). There are a number of bugs
on this on bugs.mysql.com.

Currently, I'm linking libc dynamically to avoid these problems (I
believe/hope that glibc binary compatibility has become fairly good by
now). I'm linking libz statically (bundled version) as well as libgcc as this
shouldn't cause similar problems. And compiling with `gcc` instead of `g++` to
avoid linking libstc++ at all. All mariadb code is linked statically as well,
of course.

I checked, and this seems to be the same that is done in the Sun/MySQL generic
binaries these days.

 - Kristian.