this post was submitted on 31 Jan 2024
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Linux
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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
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glibc is great, but holy shit the source code is obscured into oblivion, so hard to understand, with hardcoded optimizations, and compiler optimizations. I understand how difficult is to find vulnerabilities. A bit sad that the only C lib truely free software is so hard to actually read its code or even contribute to it.
For what it's worth, glibc is very much performance-critical, so this shouldn't be a surprise. Any possible optimization is worth it.
There are a ton of free software libc implementations outside of glibc. I think most implementations of libc are free software at this point. There's Bionic, the BSD libcs, musl, the Haiku libc, the OpenSolaris/OpenIndiana libc, Newlib, relibc, the ToaruOS libc, the SerenityOS libc and a bunch more. Pretty sure Wine/ReactOS also have free implementations of the Windows libc.
Glibc has extensions that fragment compatibility. If Glibc is replaced by another libc, some apps prints an error, or don't work. I noticed that on Alpine.