What is glibc?
The GNU C Library project provides the core libraries for the GNU system and GNU/Linux systems, as well as many other systems that use Linux as the kernel. These libraries provide critical APIs including ISO C11, POSIX.1-2008, BSD, OS-specific APIs and more. These APIs include such foundational facilities as open, read, write, malloc, printf, getaddrinfo, dlopen, pthread_create, crypt, login, exit and more.
The GNU C Library is designed to be a backwards compatible, portable, and high performance ISO C library. It aims to follow all relevant standards including ISO C11, POSIX.1-2008, and IEEE 754-2008.
The project was started circa 1988 and is almost 30 years old. You can see the complete project release history on the wiki.
Despite the project's age there is still a lot to do so please Get Started and Get Involved!
Current Status
The GNU C Library releases every 6 months. See the NEWS file in the glibc sources for more information.
- The current stable version of glibc is 2.25, released on February 5, 2017.
- The current development version of glibc 2.26, releasing on or around August 1, 2017.
Latest News
2017-02-05: glibc 2.25 released.
2016-11-24: Test results mailing list is active.
2016-08-05: glibc 2.24 released.
2016-02-19: glibc 2.23 released.
2016-02-16: CVE-2015-7547: glibc getaddrinfo() stack-based buffer overflow -- Fixed on development branch for glibc 2.23 release.
2015-08-14: glibc 2.22 released.
2015-02-06: glibc 2.21 released.
2014-09-07: glibc 2.20 released.
2014-02-08: glibc 2.19 released.
2013-08-12: glibc 2.18 released.
People
The GNU C Library is currently maintained by a community of developers many of whom are listed on the MAINTAINERS page of the project wiki.
Many others have contributed as documented in the glibc manual under: Contributors.
Thank you to all who have contributed, either in bug reports, or by answering a question, your help is appreciated.
