Re: [Condor-devel] [Condor-users] Dynamic and static linking of Condor

[Ian Chesal <ian.chesal@xxxxxxxxx>]

Alan et al: here's the followup as promised.

On Tue, Jan 26, 2010 at 12:37 PM, Alan De Smet <adesmet@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Ian Chesal <ICHESAL@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>> I have only ever been able to make the statically linked
>> libraries work reliably in my RHEL/CentOS/SuSE mixed version
>> environments. The dynamically linked versions have always died
>> with missing and mismatched library errors for me.
>
> If it's not hard to reproduce, details would be helpful.  Which
> release of Condor did you try (version, OS, architecture)? Which
> versions and architectures of RHEL, CentOS, SuSE had problems?
> What were the error messages?
>
>> In practice I find the statically linked binaries work very
>> well across my mixed bag of OS versions and hardware. My
>> experience says it's the dynamically linked libraries that
>> cause me headaches.
>
> Thanks for the report!  That's exactly why we're asking.

In trying the 7.4.1 release yesterday I thought it'd be great to work
with the dynamically linked version of Condor to see if it just works
as easily as the statically linked versions for me. We deploy Condor
on a shared drive and just run it off the share on our Linux nodes. I
deployed condor-7.4.1-linux-x86-rhel5-dynamic.tar.gz.

It ran fine on my CentOS release 5.3 (Final) machine (Linux
sj-arcdev.altera.com 2.6.18-128.1.10.el5xen #1 SMP Thu May 7 11:07:18
EDT 2009 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux).

But on my CentOS release 4.6 (Final) machine (Linux uk-swcf0160
2.6.9-67.ELsmp #1 SMP Fri Nov 16 12:49:06 EST 2007 x86_64 x86_64
x86_64 GNU/Linux)

I get:

/opt/condor/sbin/condor_master: /lib/tls/libc.so.6: version
`GLIBC_2.4' not found (required by /opt/condor/sbin/condor_master)

And that right up there is enough to make me stop. I'll take the
memory use hit, the binary size hit, and go statically linked every
time because it makes that kind of deployment and library management
nightmare (an achilles heel of Linux if you want my opinion) a
non-issue for me. I suppose I could try the RHEL3 Condor release, but
you can see the test-and-repeat loop I'm trying to avoid here, right?

I've got to support RHEL 4 through 5, CentOS 4 through 5, SuSE 9
through 11, openSuSe 9 through 11 and Windows XP SP3 (32- and 64-bit),
Windows Vista (64-bit only) and Windows 7 (64-bit only) in our pool
for our QA folks.

I don't want to have to think that hard to roll Condor out to all
those variants and the statically linked binaries make it much easier.
I appreciate the deployment simplicity they afford. :)

- Ian