The Arm Linux binaries are incompatible with older systems

[Michal Vlasák]

On Thu Sep 23, 2021 at 10:21 PM CEST, Liviu Ionescu wrote:
> For several years I used TeX Live 2018 in a cross-platform build
> environment (Docker based for Intel & Arm Linux, a separate folder on
> macOS).
>
> When I tried to upgrade all platforms to TeX Live 2021, the `install-tl`
> script failed in the Arm Docker images.
>
> After several investigations, I found out that the LUA binaries are
> compiled agains GLIBC_2.28 (probably on a Raspberry Pi):
>
> % grep GLIB install-tl.log
> texlua: /lib/aarch64-linux-gnu/libc.so.6: version `GLIBC_2.28' not found (required by texlua)
> luatex: /lib/aarch64-linux-gnu/libc.so.6: version `GLIBC_2.28' not found (required by luatex)
> [...]

Ah, the good old "too new glibc required by the binary" problem.
Recently, essentially the same problem showed up for the same
architecture for ConTeXt:

    https://mailman.ntg.nl/pipermail/ntg-context/2021/102893.html

To accomodate that, Mojca Miklavec set up a new builder for the ConTeXt
build farm (https://build.contextgarden.net/). As the build farm also
builds whole TeX Live, theoretically you could use those binaries (IIRC
the TeX Live installer allows custom binaries). But those are from the
development versions -- though I think that you can safely use the
"luatex" binary from there:

    https://dl.contextgarden.net/build/texlive/aarch64-linux.tar.xz

Anyways, the usual TeX Live binaries need a rebuild against older glibc
(by e.g. building on an older Linux distro release).

AFAICT the aarch64-linux binaries are provided by Johannes Hielscher and
the armhf-linux binaries by Simon Dales. But maybe the binaries can be
built on the ConTeXt build farm by Mojca, considering that it is already
set up?

Michal Vlasák

PS: The only GLIBC_2.28 symbol in luatex seems to be fcntl64. Which is
there, because the Lua filesystem (LFS) library used by LuaTeX supports
long files by default. There is a check for LFS_DO_NOT_USE_LARGE_FILE,
though it's probably not wise to go that route.