[gentoo-dev-announce] New subproject: Hardened uClibc

[Anthony G. Basile]

Hi everyone,

I'd like to announce a new subproject of Hardened Gentoo: Hardened 
uClibc.  It is an effort to port both tool chain and kernel hardening to 
uClibc based systems for a variety of architectures, treating uClibc 
more as a drop in alternative to glibc, and not necessarily as 
"embedded". Embedded systems aim to produce kernels and user lands with 
tiny footprints, and so tend to use busybox as their "Swiss Army Knife" 
of common UNIX utilities. While not excluding this possibility, we aim 
at making most (all?) of Gentoo's packages both hardened and uClibc 
compatible.

The subproject crosses three areas: hardened, embedded and releng.  For 
a while I was just manually building and tarballing chroots, but I'm 
migrating to proper stage3's built using catalyst.  The following table 
gives a brief summary of the current state of affairs:

Arch          ABI(s)                             Medium
amd64      Generic                           stage3 desktop
arm           armv7a                           stage4
mips          mips32r2 mipsel32r2      stage4
x86           i686                                stage3
ppc <in progress>

These are available on the mirrors under 
${MIRROR}/expiermental/${ARCH}/uclibc.

uClibc has made it quite a ways in the last few years. For amd64, I 
built an entire desktop system based on XFCE4 which is also on the 
mirrors.  However, this is still work in progress and should be 
considered experimental. Eg. upgrading the desktop from glib-2.30.3 to 
glib-2.32.4-r1 breaks.  The stage3's are the closest to being stable.

The project homepage is at http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/hardened/uclibc/

Anthony G. Basile <blueness@g.o>

-- 
Anthony G. Basile, Ph.D.
Gentoo Linux Developer [Hardened]
E-Mail    : blueness@g.o
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