This is klibc, what is intended to be a minimalistic libc subset for use with initramfs. It is deliberately written for small size, minimal entaglement, and portability, not speed. It is definitely a work in progress, and a lot of things are still missing. The build procedure is not very polished yet, but it should work like this: a) In the source root directory (the directory above the one in which this file is found) create a symlink called "linux" pointing to a reasonably recent Linux kernel tree (2.4 or 2.6 should be OK.) This tree must have the include/asm symlink set up for the architecture you're compiling for, and include/linux/autoconf.h must exist. The easiest way to make sure of all of these is to do a "make config" or any of its variants on the kernel tree is question, followed by a "make dep" (2.4) or "make prepare" (2.6). b) If you're cross-compiling, change ARCH in the main MCONFIG file to the appropriate architecture, and set CROSS to your toolchain prefix. IMPORTANT: if you're on a 64-bit machine with a 32-bit userland (ia64, mips64, ppc64 sparc64, s390x or x86_64), and you want to build the 32-bit version: you need to set ARCH to the 32-bit architecture as well as set up the linux/include/asm symlink to point to the 32-bit architecture. Building the 32-bit architecture usually (but not always) produces smaller binaries, and is likely to be better tested. If you are on ARM, and want to build a thumb version of the library (this is supported), change OPTFLAGS in arch/arm/MCONFIG to build thumb code. The following is the last known status of various architectures: alpha: Working static, shared untested arm-thumb: Untested arm26: Not yet ported arm: Working cris: Working h8300: Not yet ported i386: Working ia64: Working m32r: Untested m68k: Not yet ported mips64: Not yet ported mips: Working parisc: Untested ppc64: Working ppc: Working s390: Working static, shared untested s390x: Working sh: Untested sparc64: Untested sparc: Working v850: Not yet ported x86-64: Working Shared library support requires recent binutils on many architectures. "Need sysstub.ph" means the architectural changes first implemented in klibc-0.117 has not yet been implemented; klibc-0.116 did, however, work. "Not yet ported" means no porting work has been done on this architecture. Note that even the "working" ones likely have bugs. Please report them if you run into them. c) Type "make" and pray... d) Try the test programs in the tests/ directory. They should run... Contact the klibc mailing list: http://www.zytor.com/mailman/listinfo/klibc ... for more info. -hpa