We upgraded our SGE cluster machines to Debian testing release, which contains beside other things the latest 2.6 libc:

marie# dpkg -l|grep libc6
ii libc6 2.6.1-1+b1 GNU C Library: Shared libraries
ii libc6-i686 2.6.1-1+b1 GNU C Library: Shared libraries


Especially on the master node, this package version for libc is needed to install libmotif3 from the Debian repositories, which is a prerequisite for the qmon tool.

After upgrading everything, the SGE daemons refused to be started by the old /etc/init.d/ scripts, while the direct start of the binaries still worked. I figured out that the Sun shell scripts rely on the output from SGE_ROOT/util/arch, which returned the following on our updated installation:

UNSUPPORTED-lx24-GLIBC-2.6-x86

With bash -x arch, I got the following execution dump:


...
++ strings /lib/libc.so.6
++ grep 'GNU C Library'
+ libc_string='GNU C Library stable release version 2.6.1, by Roland McGrath et al.'
+ '[' 0 -ne 0 ']'
++ echo GNU C Library stable release version 2.6.1, by Roland McGrath et al.
++ tr ' ,' '\n'
++ grep '2\.'
++ cut -f 2 -d .
+ libc_version=6
+ case $libc_version in
+ unsupported=UNSUPPORTED-
+ lxrelease=24-GLIBC-2.6
+ ARCH=UNSUPPORTED-lx24-GLIBC-2.6-x86
...


I am not a shell script expert, but fetching the libc version by using strings on the binary looks a little bit weird.

Anyway, looking for the libc_version variable in the arch script brought up the following:


# verify the GNU C lib version
# For an alternative means to determine GNU C lib version see
# http://www.gnu.org/software/libc/FAQ.html#s-4.9
case $lxmachine in
amd64)
libc_string=`strings /lib64/libc.so.6 | grep "GNU C Library"`
;;
ia64)
libc_string=`strings /lib/libc.so.6.1 | grep "GNU C Library"`
;;
*)
libc_string=`strings /lib/libc.so.6 | grep "GNU C Library"`
;;
esac

# retrieving libc version failed
if [ $? -ne 0 ]; then
unsupported="UNSUPPORTED-"
lxrelease="${lxrelease}-GLIBC"
else
libc_version=`echo $libc_string | tr ' ,' '\n' | grep "2\." | cut -f 2 -d "."`
case $libc_version in
2)
unsupported="u"
;;
3|4|5)
;;
*)
unsupported="UNSUPPORTED-"
lxrelease=24-GLIBC-2.${libc_version}
esac
fi
;;


As you can see in the last part, all libc minor versions until 2.5 are considered to be known. I couldn’t find any problem statement for libc2.6 on the SGE web pages, so I added the missing “|6)”, and everything works now.