Future of glibc support (aka. migrate from CentOS to Debian builders)

[webmaster128]

In #32, CentOS 7 support was requested, which we now use for building glibc shared librararies for Linux. CentOS changed its release cycle to streaming releases and the latest CentOS 8 is discontinued. CentOS 7.9 will be supported until end of 2024. Also CentOS 7 only supports x86-64, i.e. we would need different builder systems for x86_64 and ARM.

So the question is if we find a more future proof build image, that uses a low version of glibc and ideally has native support for AArch64.

@westaking what systems are you using these days? Is CentOS still used? If so, which version?

[webmaster128]

It seems like CentOS 7.9 is still fine to be used for the glibc build for x86_64 until June 2024.

For the corss-compilation of the glibc/aarch64 build it would be good to migrate away from CentOS as we have to rely on some old third party builds of glibc since the cross-compilation tooling is only maintained for kernel builds. Looking at https://jensd.be/1126/linux/cross-compiling-for-arm-or-aarch64-on-debian-or-ubuntu, it seems like Debian or Ubuntu are a better choice as they have the cross compilation tooling available.

[webmaster128]

As stated in https://serverfault.com/a/1161831, CentOS 7 is dead now. We dan't use it anymore as creating builder images now fails with

0.470 14: curl#6 - "Could not resolve host: mirrorlist.centos.org; Unknown error"

[webmaster128]

Debian 12 leads to a glibc requirement of 2.34.
Debian 11 leads to a glibc requirement of 2.28, using this for now.