libslirp and static linking

libslirp and static linking

[Peter Maydell]

Hi; I noticed today that Debian's libslirp-dev package doesn't ship
a static library version of libslirp. I was going to file a Debian
bug about that, but then looking at upstream 'libslirp' I found
that its README.md
https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/slirp/libslirp
only documents how to build a shared library libslirp, and says
"(QEMU may build with the submodule static library using --enable-slirp=git)"

So:
(1) is it possible to build the separate libslirp package as
    a static library currently?
(2) if not, can it be enhanced to do so?
(3) otherwise, is upstream QEMU going to have to retain the
    git submodule just for the static linking case ?


I also found that at least the pkg-config file shipped with
Ubuntu libslirp-dev 4.1.0-2ubuntu2.2 results in 'configure --static'
incorrectly detecting that libslirp is present, even though that
package does not ship a static library. I'm not sure whether that's
a bug in the pkg-config file, in the Debian/Ubuntu packaging, or in
QEMU's library probing code...

thanks
-- PMM

Re: libslirp and static linking

[Paolo Bonzini]

On 8/5/22 18:13, Peter Maydell wrote:
> Hi; I noticed today that Debian's libslirp-dev package doesn't ship
> a static library version of libslirp. I was going to file a Debian
> bug about that, but then looking at upstream 'libslirp' I found
> that its README.md
> https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/slirp/libslirp
> only documents how to build a shared library libslirp, and says
> "(QEMU may build with the submodule static library using --enable-slirp=git)"
> 
> So:
> (1) is it possible to build the separate libslirp package as
>      a static library currently?

Yes (same with any other meson project):

$ meson setup -Ddefault_library=both build
$ ninja -Cbuild
$ ls -ld build/libslirp*
-rw-r--r--. 1 pbonzini users 1182058 Aug  5 19:30 build/libslirp.a

Paolo