GNU C Library

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GNU C Library
<tr><th>Developer:</th><td>GNU Project</td></tr><tr><th>Latest release:</th><td>2.5 / September 29, 2006</td></tr><tr><th>OS:</th><td>Cross-platform</td></tr>
Use:	Runtime library <tr><th>License:</th><td>LGPL</td></tr>
Website:	GNU LibC

The GNU C Library, or glibc, is GNU's C standard library. It is free software and is available under the GNU Lesser General Public License. Originally written by Roland McGrath, the library's development is overseen by a committee, with Ulrich Drepper as the lead contributor and maintainer.[1]

In addition to providing the functionality required by Unix98, Single UNIX Specification, POSIX (1c, 1d, and 1j) and some of the functionality required by ISO C99, Glibc also provides extensions which have been deemed useful or necessary while developing GNU.

Glibc is used in systems which run many different kernels and different hardware architectures. Its most common use is in Linux systems on x86 hardware, but officially supported hardware includes: x86, Motorola 680x0, DEC Alpha, PowerPC, ARM, ETRAX CRIS, MIPS, s390, and SPARC. It officially supports the Hurd and Linux kernels, although there are heavily patched versions that run on the kernels of FreeBSD and NetBSD (from which GNU/kFreeBSD and GNU/kNetBSD systems are built, respectively). It is also used (in an edited form) as the libroot of BeOS and hence Haiku.

[edit] libc6

Glibc version 2 has been referred to by Linux users as libc6, because it replaced the older Linux C library, which was itself a fork of a much earlier glibc and used versions 2 through 5. This name is less common nowadays; however, glibc on Linux systems still uses the soname libc.so.6 and some packaging systems still call it libc6 (especially those that follow the convention that a new soname means a new package name).