Bug#1035904: dpkg currently warning about merged-usr systems (revisited)
On Mon, 15 May 2023 at 18:54, Simon McVittie <smcv@debian.org> wrote:
>
> On Sun, 14 May 2023 at 23:37:34 +0200, Josh Triplett wrote:
> > People build things on Debian that are not Debian packages. People
> > compile binaries on Debian, and expect them to work on any system that
> > has sufficiently new libraries.
>
> *raises hand*
>
> Hello, I represent an example of those people. With my $work hat on,
> I'm involved in maintaining a family of Debian derivatives (the Steam
> Runtime) that is used to run Steam games on arbitrary distributions,
> including but not limited to Debian. Some of these binaries are built
> on a Debian derivative, but run on an arbitrary other distribution,
> using a RPATH[1] to find their non-glibc dependencies.
>
> At the moment those binaries are built in ancient environments (based
> on Ubuntu 12.04 and Debian 8), but as newer versions of glibc become
> ubiquitous, we'll want to start relying on newer versions of Debian
> (which will still be very old versions *at the time*, but I'm sure that
> by 2030 or 2040 we'll want to be using versions of Debian that, in 2023,
> are not released yet). In this use-case, yes we do need to be using the
> interoperable ELF interpreter path.
>
> We were able to use (Ubuntu and) Debian for this *because* Debian is
> a relatively "ordinary" distribution that tends to follow cross-distro
> standards. The major counterexample is multiarch library paths, but
> multiarch library paths have some compelling technical advantages, and
> because there's no ambiguity about which architecture uses which directory,
> they're actually better for interop in some ways than /usr/lib (which
> is ambiguous, because the Red Hat family of distros expects to find 32-bit
> libraries there, but the Arch family expects 64-bit libraries, and it's
> not possible to construct a tree where both get what they want).
>
> I've spent a lot of the last 5 years working on putting Steam games in
> containers so that they'll work more reliably on all distros, including
> Debian, with less reliance on weird library search paths (although we
> still have to use binaries built on an ancient Debian derivative with a
> non-trivial RPATH to bootstrap the container environment). Because of
> constraints around recent GPUs needing current graphics drivers even
> if running on an otherwise ancient library stack, Steam's container
> runtime has to construct a hybrid environment where glibc is either the
> one from the host or the one from the container runtime environment,
> whichever is newer; and while doing that, we have experienced some
> broken situations that were caused by distributions diverging from the
> interoperable ELF interpreter. One concrete example is that Arch Linux
> uses the interoperable ELF interpreter for *almost* all executables,
> but uses a different ELF interpreter for executables from the glibc
> source package, for whatever reason; we were able to work around this,
> but for a while it caused Arch to fail to launch these containers where
> Debian/Fedora/etc. could.
This sounds like a very interesting use case, and the first real one
mentioned, which is great to see - but I do not fully follow yet, from
what you are saying it seems to me that what you need is for your
binaries to use the usual pt_interp, that bit is clear. But why does
it matter if /usr/bin/ls on the host uses a different one? It's your
executables that you ship as part of that runtime that are the entry
points that need the usual loader path for your chroot-on-steroids,
no? The loader would still be reachable as it always was in this
theoretical exercise. I am probably missing something in how this
works in details.
Kind regards,
Luca Boccassi
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