Running Linux, Third Edition

System Libraries

Early in the dark ages of the SPARC port of Linux, we first used an a.out libc4 as the system C library. Several factors were behind this. First, we used a.out SunOS binaries to bootstrap the first-ever Linux/SPARC systems, so we knew that a.out worked. Second, this was the most stable libc source base at the time. I hope that not very many (if any) SPARC systems running this C library exist any longer. All native Linux binaries using libc4 were statically linked.

ELF-based libc5 was the next library for Linux/SPARC. The earliest complete distributions used this for the system libraries. Shared ELF libraries were fully supported on SPARC.

Today, most Linux/SPARC systems are glibc/ELF based and will probably remain this way for the foreseeable future.