[linux] How can I link to a specific glibc version?

In my opinion, the laziest solution (especially if you don't rely on latest bleeding edge C/C++ features, or latest compiler features) wasn't mentioned yet, so here it is:

Just build on the system with the oldest GLIBC you still want to support.

This is actually pretty easy to do nowadays with technologies like chroot, or KVM/Virtualbox, or docker, even if you don't really want to use such an old distro directly on any pc. In detail, to make a maximum portable binary of your software I recommend following these steps:

  1. Just pick your poison of sandbox/virtualization/... whatever, and use it to get yourself a virtual older Ubuntu LTS and compile with the gcc/g++ it has in there by default. That automatically limits your GLIBC to the one available in that environment.

  2. Avoid depending on external libs outside of foundational ones: like, you should dynamically link ground-level system stuff like glibc, libGL, libxcb/X11/wayland things, libasound/libpulseaudio, possibly GTK+ if you use that, but otherwise preferrably statically link external libs/ship them along if you can. Especially mostly self-contained libs like image loaders, multimedia decoders, etc can cause less breakage on other distros (breakage can be caused e.g. if only present somewhere in a different major version) if you statically ship them.

With that approach you get an old-GLIBC-compatible binary without any manual symbol tweaks, without doing a fully static binary (that may break for more complex programs because glibc hates that, and which may cause licensing issues for you), and without setting up any custom toolchain, any custom glibc copy, or whatever.

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