SBCL 1.0.55 x64 needs GLIBC 2.14

It installed on my Ubuntu 11.10 (Oneiric) laptop, but when I tried to run it, I got this message:

sbcl: /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libc.so.6: version `GLIBC_2.14' not found (required by sbcl)

Hmmm. Let’s see..

# ls -al /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libc.so.6
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 12 2012-03-06 21:17 /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libc.so.6 -> libc-2.13.so

Argh.

This has already been reported in the SBCL bug database.

My workaround was to grab 1.0.54 from the old file releases section on SBCL’s sourceforge site. That worked fine. So you’ll need to downgrade if you want to use the 64 bit version.

This came up when I ran into problems installing cl-libxml2 using quicklisp. The x86 version of SBCL throws an error when using cffi to load the Ubuntu-packaged libxml2 library, because it expects a 32-bit version of the library but finds a 64-bit one instead (I neglected to copy the error message, but it’s something about finding an unexpected/wrong class ELFCLASS64).

So I suspect anyone who has a x64 system that uses cffi to access libraries in this manner will run into the same problem with SBCL 1.0.55.

On a side note, I can’t imagine installing and managing Common Lisp libraries without quicklisp. It took a few seconds to do what would probably take a beginner like me hours to figure out. Awesome tools like that make a huge difference to newcomers who want to get up and running with CL without a lot of pain.

* * *

UPDATE: This is fixed in 1.0.56.

One thought on “SBCL 1.0.55 x64 needs GLIBC 2.14”

  1. I still have the same problem. Sept ’12. Ubuntu 10.04 on 64-bit hardware. Rolled .58 back to 1.0.56. Thanks for this post and the links to the bug reports, this was crucial.

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