Linking against an old version of libc to provide greater application coverage

Question

Linux binaries are usually dynamically linked to the core system library (libc). This keeps the memory footprint of the binary quite small but binaries which are dependent on the latest libraries will not run on older systems. Conversely, binaries linked to older libraries will run happily on the latest systems.

Therefore, in order to ensure our application has good coverage during distribution we need to figure out the oldest libc we can support and link our binary against that.

Does anyone have any advice and/or insight as to how we should determine the oldest version of libc we can link to?

Thanks - Gearoid

Answer 1

glibc 2.2 is a pretty common minimum version. However finding a build platform for that version may be non-trivial.

Probably a better direction is to think about the oldest OS you want to support and build on that.