How to update glibc ​

Background ​

The GNU C Library (glibc) is the standard C library for the GNU system. It is the main library for the GNU system and is used by most programs on GNU/Linux systems. It provides the basic routines for allocating memory, searching directories, opening and closing files, reading and writing files, string handling, pattern matching, arithmetic, and so on.

When you install some software on Linux, you may encounter the following error:

./configure: /lib64/libc.so.6: version `GLIBC_2.14' not found (required by ./configure)

This error means that the version of glibc is too low. You need to update glibc to the latest version.

We can check the version of glibc by the following command:

strings /lib64/libc.so.6|grep GLIBC_

The output is as follows:

GLIBC_2.2.5
GLIBC_2.2.6
GLIBC_2.3
GLIBC_2.3.2
GLIBC_2.3.3
GLIBC_2.3.4
GLIBC_2.4
GLIBC_2.5
GLIBC_2.6
GLIBC_2.7
GLIBC_2.8
GLIBC_2.9
GLIBC_2.10
GLIBC_2.11
GLIBC_2.12
GLIBC_PRIVATE

As you can see, the version of glibc is 2.12. It is too low. We need to update it to the latest version.

Update glibc ​

First, we need to create a directory to store the glibc source code:

mkdir ~/tmp/glibc

Then, we need to download the glibc source code:

cd ~/tmp/glibc
wget --no-check-certificate https://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/glibc/glibc-2.17.tar.gz

Notice: --no-check-certificate is used to disable the certificate check, because the certificate of the official website is very new to some Linux distributions, so the system may not trust it, and cause the download to fail.

Next, we need to extract the source code:

tar -xvf glibc-2.17.tar.gz

Then, you will see a directory named glibc-2.17. If you have problem extracting the source code, you can see How to compress and de compress.

We need to enter the directory and compile the source code, then install it:

cd glibc-2.17
mkdir build && cd build
../configure --prefix=/usr --disable-profile --enable-add-ons --with-headers=/usr/include --with-binutils=/usr/bin
make&&make install

Notice: installing glibc requires root privileges, so you need switch to root user, or use sudo to execute the above commands.

Now we have updated glibc to the latest version. We can check the version of glibc again:

strings /lib64/libc.so.6|grep GLIBC_

The output is as follows:

GLIBC_2.2.5
GLIBC_2.2.6
GLIBC_2.3
GLIBC_2.3.2
GLIBC_2.3.3
GLIBC_2.3.4
GLIBC_2.4
GLIBC_2.5
GLIBC_2.6
GLIBC_2.7
GLIBC_2.8
GLIBC_2.9
GLIBC_2.10
GLIBC_2.11
GLIBC_2.12
GLIBC_2.13
GLIBC_2.14
GLIBC_2.15
GLIBC_2.16
GLIBC_2.17
GLIBC_PRIVATE

As you can see, the version of glibc has been updated to 2.17. Now we can install the software that requires a higher version of glibc.