libstdc++-static missing on RHEL8

[shirodkara]

I am trying to build grpc-java on powerpc ppc64le under RHEL8, however since RHEL8 doesn't contain the libstdc++-static packages the following error is seen :

Task :grpc-compiler:linkJava_pluginExecutable FAILED
/usr/bin/ld: cannot find -libgcc_s
/usr/bin/ld: cannot find -libstdc++
collect2: error: ld returned 1 exit status

any ideas on how we can work around this ?

[dapengzhang0]

If you don't need to checkout the latest code, you can build on a released grpc-java tag. Otherwise you must follow COMPILING.md. See the first paragraph of https://github.com/grpc/grpc-java/tree/master/examples#grpc-examples

[ejona86]

FWIW, I see a libstdc++.a in /usr/lib/gcc/x86_64-redhat-linux/8/32/ as part of the gcc-c++ package. RHEL does disavow all compatibility when using it in RHEL 8 though. I expect that's because every C++ library would then need to be statically linked, which we do for the protobuf plugin.

[ejona86]

Nevermind. The libstdc++.a I saw is just a broken symbolic link.

Is there a reason you are building from source? It seems it doesn't take much to make it compile.

yum install -y autoconf automake diffutils gcc-c++ glibc-devel java-1.8.0-openjdk-devel libstdc++-devel libtool make tar which patch
./buildscripts/make_dependencies.sh
export LDFLAGS=-L/tmp/protobuf/lib
export CXXFLAGS=-I/tmp/protobuf/include
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/tmp/protobuf/lib
patch -p1 <<EOF
diff --git a/compiler/build.gradle b/compiler/build.gradle
index 60d3a43..55acee0 100644
--- a/compiler/build.gradle
+++ b/compiler/build.gradle
@@ -105,7 +105,6 @@ model {
                     // Link other (system) libraries dynamically.
                     // Clang under OSX doesn't support these options.
                     linker.args "-Wl,-Bstatic", "-lprotoc", "-lprotobuf", "-static-libgcc",
-                            "-static-libstdc++",
                             "-Wl,-Bdynamic", "-lpthread", "-s"
                 }
                 addEnvArgs("LDFLAGS", linker.args)
EOF
./gradlew -PskipAndroid=true :grpc-compiler:build

[ejona86]

Closing. Unclear why building from source on RHEL8 is necessary. There's also an easy workaround. If we hear back more details we can reopen.

[shirodkara]

Hi @ejona86 would it make sense to have the changes in /compiler/build.gradle to not link statically , so as to make it work out of the box when building on RHEL8 and higher ?

Regarding building on source , we are building for PowerPC ppc64le

[ejona86]

Ah, I see. FWIW, you can gradle build without static linking. It is only gradle publish that does the check. The built binary is available at build/exe/java_plugin/protoc-gen-grpc-java.

The check is there for a reason, to make sure we don't release a "broken" binary. So I don't want to outright disable it. We could maybe disable it just for PPC with an if in compiler/build.gradle.

We'd be quite happy to add a build of PPC64 if someone contributes it (such that they can test that the result works). We are cross-compiling for aarch64 and it has been working okay:

grpc-java/buildscripts/kokoro/linux_artifacts.sh

Lines 35 to 37 in 8a9aa41

	# for aarch64 platform
	sudo apt-get install -y g++-aarch64-linux-gnu
	SKIP_TESTS=true ARCH=aarch_64 "$GRPC_JAVA_DIR"/buildscripts/kokoro/unix.sh

grpc-java/buildscripts/kokoro/upload_artifacts.sh

Lines 31 to 32 in d4fa0ec

	# for linux aarch64 platform
	[[ "$(find "$LOCAL_MVN_ARTIFACTS" -type f -iname 'protoc-gen-grpc-java-*-linux-aarch_64.exe' | wc -l)" != '0' ]]

We will need to deal with lack of static linking on RHEL8 one day, but we only just recently dropped RHEL6 support so that's still a few years down the line.

[ejona86]

Closing since haven't heard back. We'd be fine accepting a PR to add PPC64 cross-compilation support. RHEL8 will be a problem one day, but I think we'll avoid it for now. You can either build in a RHEL 7 container or avoid gradle publish which does the static linking check.

[shirodkara]

HI @ejona86 I have raised a PR for the changes #8141