Doesn't the musl-gcc wrapper provide the necessary magic to link to the platform specific 'C' Library on Alpine Linux ?

I think you're right, the musl-gcc wrapper provide some magic to link glic functions, but all the functions must be POSIX compliant. I read that glusterfs use not POSIX functions : https://bugs.alpinelinux.org/issues/2834 .

Portablexdr doesn't seem to work with glusterfs (usually rpcgen is provided by glibc but musl doesn't have it):

Making all in rpc/xdr/gen
glusterfs3-xdr.x:39: syntax error

Both 3.10.7 and master produce the same error.

+1

rpcgen is in its own separate package. At least in alpine 3.9.2. (Similar to Fedora28+ and RHEL8 where rpcgen has been removed from glibc. I expect other distributions will do the same eventually.)

I didn't look in any older versions.

apk update && apk add rpcgen

But there are other issues with this rpcgen that alpine ships. It's not the same as the unbundled rpcgen in Fedora and doesn't like the "hyper" data type in, e.g., glusterfs4-xdr.x

apk info rpcgen says it's built from the source from/git.linux-nfs.org which I presume is really git://git.linux-nfs.org/projects/steved/nfs-utils.git, and rpcgen in that repo is deprecated according to steved.

Alpine should probably use the rpcgen that's in Fedora from https://github.com/thkukuk/rpcsvc-proto.git, which supports the "hyper" data type (i.e. quad_t).

Without support for hyper, nobody is going to get very far building glusterfs.

Someone with a vested interest in Alpine should get them to update to a modern/current rpcgen. In the mean time anyone wanting to build gluster will absolutely have to build their own rpcgen from source.

Thank you for your contributions.
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It will be closed in 2 weeks if no one responds with a comment here.

Please keep this open to track it somewhere.

Thanks for reply; removing tag.

Thank you for your contributions.
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bump

Two things here. I tried to get this done last year, and the changes in xdr lib was little too much, and there were discussions about newer network layer, and I left it off at that.

Considering we from kadalu.io would like to have a smaller footprint of glusterfs in container image, I will see if we can get this picked up. If anyone wants to volunteers, (with protobuf experience), happy to coordinate.

Gave this a try... stuck with below error, and not sure how to go about that:

/usr/lib/gcc/x86_64-alpine-linux-musl/9.3.0/../../../../x86_64-alpine-linux-musl/bin/ld: ../../libglusterfs/src/.libs/libglusterfs.so: undefined reference to `swapcontext'
/usr/lib/gcc/x86_64-alpine-linux-musl/9.3.0/../../../../x86_64-alpine-linux-musl/bin/ld: ../../libglusterfs/src/.libs/libglusterfs.so: undefined reference to `getcontext'
/usr/lib/gcc/x86_64-alpine-linux-musl/9.3.0/../../../../x86_64-alpine-linux-musl/bin/ld: ../../libglusterfs/src/.libs/libglusterfs.so: undefined reference to `makecontext'
collect2: error: ld returned 1 exit status

@xhernandez According to this link below is mentioned:

With the incorporation of the ISO/IEC 9899:1999 standard into this specification it was found that the ISO C standard (Subclause 6.11.6) specifies that the use of function declarators with empty parentheses is an obsolescent feature. Therefore, using the function prototype:

void makecontext(ucontext_t *ucp, void (*func)(), int argc, ...);

is making use of an obsolescent feature of the ISO C standard. Therefore, a strictly conforming POSIX application cannot use this form. Therefore, use of getcontext(), makecontext(), and swapcontext() is marked obsolescent.

Looks like its not supported in musl-dev at all, and hence glusterfs is not able to link fine.

To get to this, I needed to do few changes in code, including not building gfapi (more errors seen). I will update later about all dependencies and changes done. The rpcgen issues etc are gone now, and libtirpc-dev also is available. So all good there.

With below dockerfile

FROM alpine:latest

RUN apk add git automake autoconf libtool build-base rpcgen flex bison openssl-dev
RUN apk add libuuid util-linux-dev acl-dev zlib-dev python3-dev libxml2-dev argp-standalone
RUN apk add libtirpc-dev userspace-rcu-dev fuse-dev

RUN git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/amarts/glusterfs_fork --branch alpine_compile --single-branch glusterfs

RUN cd glusterfs && ./autogen.sh && GF_LDFLAGS="/usr/lib/libargp.a" ./configure --without-gfapi && make

# Debugging, Comment the above line and
# uncomment below line
ENTRYPOINT ["tail", "-f", "/dev/null"]

and docker build -t glusterfs-alpine -f ./Dockerfile.alpine . as command I was able to test this.

Gave this a try... stuck with below error, and not sure how to go about that:

/usr/lib/gcc/x86_64-alpine-linux-musl/9.3.0/../../../../x86_64-alpine-linux-musl/bin/ld: ../../libglusterfs/src/.libs/libglusterfs.so: undefined reference to `swapcontext'
/usr/lib/gcc/x86_64-alpine-linux-musl/9.3.0/../../../../x86_64-alpine-linux-musl/bin/ld: ../../libglusterfs/src/.libs/libglusterfs.so: undefined reference to `getcontext'
/usr/lib/gcc/x86_64-alpine-linux-musl/9.3.0/../../../../x86_64-alpine-linux-musl/bin/ld: ../../libglusterfs/src/.libs/libglusterfs.so: undefined reference to `makecontext'
collect2: error: ld returned 1 exit status

@xhernandez According to this link below is mentioned:

With the incorporation of the ISO/IEC 9899:1999 standard into this specification it was found that the ISO C standard (Subclause 6.11.6) specifies that the use of function declarators with empty parentheses is an obsolescent feature. Therefore, using the function prototype:
void makecontext(ucontext_t *ucp, void (*func)(), int argc, ...);
is making use of an obsolescent feature of the ISO C standard. Therefore, a strictly conforming POSIX application cannot use this form. Therefore, use of getcontext(), makecontext(), and swapcontext() is marked obsolescent.

Looks like its not supported in musl-dev at all, and hence glusterfs is not able to link fine.

Without support for makecontext() and similar functions, it will be hard to make gluster run on this platform. One possibility is to use a setjmp()/longjmp() with some tricks for stack allocation to simulate those functions, but creation of synctasks will probably be slow if we want to use a portable method.

Another way is to implement those functions ourselves, but it's not trivial because we would need to do it at very low level (probably assembly) and we'll need to do it for each machine type we want to be able to run Gluster. Probably this is not the right approach.

Ack, I agree. Currently a lot of logic depends on syncop* logic. I wouldn't pursue this further now, but happy if anyone has a way to get this resolved in alpine. As per basic searches, even openssl had issue, but they run in minimal no-async mode on alpine. We can't even run our server only version too.

I will keep the issue open, and keep the branch alive, so anyone interested can pick it up and take it forward. For now, focusing on few other things.

Thank you for your contributions.
Noticed that this issue is not having any activity in last ~6 months! We are marking this issue as stale because it has not had recent activity.
It will be closed in 2 weeks if no one responds with a comment here.

bump

Thank you for your contributions.
Noticed that this issue is not having any activity in last ~6 months! We are marking this issue as stale because it has not had recent activity.
It will be closed in 2 weeks if no one responds with a comment here.

😞

Any info about this?

@amarts We are doing a triage of the bugs that we are going to fix. Do you have bandwidth to work on this? Otherwise we can go ahead and close it. If you have partial solution somewhere, please publish it, so that we can refer to this in the future if we want to pick it up.

No bandwidth. Will close.

I see that @kohlschuetter is working on this issue and sent PR for the same. Re-opening the issue.

The code in the above PR works just fine to build on/run with Alpine Linux 3.21, and I hope it can get merged soon.

I also have a working ABUILD/apk binaries for x86_64, which I'm trying to push to the Alpine Linux community repo at some point in the near future (this will require some sort of "release tarball", which I'm currently hosting on my own forked repo).