musl

musl is a libc implementation which strives to be lightweight, fast, simple, and correct.

Void officially supports musl by using it in its codebase for all target platforms (although binary packages are not available for i686). Additionally, all compatible packages in our official repositories are available with musl-linked binaries in addition to their glibc counterparts.

Currently, there are nonfree and debug sub-repositories for musl, but no multilib sub-repo.

Incompatible software

musl practices very strict and minimal standard compliance. Many commonly used platform-specific extensions are not present. Because of this, it is common for software to need modification to compile and/or function properly. Void developers work to patch such software and hopefully get portability/correctness changes accepted into the upstream projects.

Proprietary software rarely supports non-glibc libc implementations, although sometimes these applications are available as flatpaks, which provide their own libc in the image.

glibc chroot

Software requiring glibc can be run in a glibc chroot.

Create a directory that will contain the chroot, and install a base system in it via the base-voidstrap package. If network access is required, copy /etc/resolv.conf into the chroot; /etc/hosts may need to be copied as well.

Several directories then need to be mounted as follows:

<chroot_dir>/sys # mount --rbind /dev <chroot_dir>/dev # mount --rbind /run
<chroot_dir>/run ```

Use [chroot(1)](https://man.voidlinux.org/chroot.1) to change to the new
root, then run glibc programs as usual. Once you've finished using it,
unmount the chroot using [umount(8)](https://man.voidlinux.org/umount.8).

#### PRoot

An alternative to the above is
[proot(1)](https://man.voidlinux.org/proot.1), a user-space implementation
of chroot, mount --bind, and binfmt_misc. By installing the `proot` package,
unprivileged users can utilize a chroot environment.