How to build lxc for bionic libc?

LXC
1

in lxc GitHub says it’s compatible with bionic android libc but how do i build it for?

2

We used to test it with something like: lxc-ci/bin/build-android at 56125d42ce52106977c0e16b6e9aa35872d090e8 · lxc/lxc-ci · GitHub

But I suspect we’re going to be discontinuing the bionic support as it’s extremely rarely used, near impossible to reliably test and the source of a lot of hacks in our codebase.

3

ok but can you like make one tarball with latest lxc source the newest i could find was 3.1.0 which is really old.

4

The script I linked builds current LXC from git with bionic on a system that’s setup with the Android SDK.

LXC release tarballs can be found here: Linux Containers - LXC - Downloads

1 Like
5

Hi its really sad to hear that you plan discontinuing the bionic support as I do have a project where i use lxc on android so if you need any help testing/any hardware to perform test’s please let me know.

7

The reality is that on our side we only cared about that for maybe around 6 months as part of a project Canonical was working on years ago. We’ve since been trying to keep that code working but utterly failing as different versions of the Android SDK behave differently.

And we’ve also run into potential legal issues with this stuff as bionic missing some critical functions required us to copy/re-implement a bunch of functions within liblxc itself, which causes a bit of a mix of licenses and makes it problematic for us to release under the license of our choice.

So I think for now the right thing to do will be to remove that logic, get us back to a simpler codebase where we know all the licensing/copyright is clear and consistent.

Then if someone wants to properly support Android again, we’d be open to that, but we’d want it done significantly better than what we did ourselves in the past, meaning working with bionic upstream to add some of the various missing bits, adding proper automated testing for a set of supported Android SDK/NDK versions, properly documenting how to use this thing on Android, …

Basically making it something that we can actually support like any of our other targets.