Re: questions about porting postgresql to older operating system

On 14/01/2021 20:18, Tom Lane wrote:
> Tim Kelly <gtkelly@dialectronics.com> writes >> 3) Can postgresql still work without dynamic loading support?
> 
> mmm ... in principle yes, but you'll lose one heck of a lot of
> functionality that's implemented in extension modules.  Possibly
> that could be worked around by deciding which extensions you need
> and statically binding them into the backend executable.  Again,
> that's not a case we've worried about for the last twenty years
> or so, so there's likely to be some pain there.

As it happens, I tried to build a completely static postgres binary 
yesterday. I was debugging the failure on sparc64, and I found out about 
user-space qemu, which can run binaries in binaries in a foreign 
architecture directly without a virtual machine. However, it requires 
that the binary is compiled statically. Cross-compiling a static 
postgres binary was surprisingly easy on Debian, but when I tried to run 
it, initdb failed because some library functions like getpweid() and 
gethostaddr() didn't work when linked statically. The cross-compiler 
warned about those, which was nice. I stubbed out a few of those library 
functions, but eventually it failed on a call to dlopen(). That's where 
I gave up.

It would be cool if that worked.

- Heikki