It is very possible to have multiple versions of glibc on the same system (we do that every day).
However, you need to know that glibc consists of many pieces (200+ shared libraries) which all must match. One of the pieces is ld-linux.so.2, and it must match libc.so.6, or you’ll see the errors you are seeing.
The absolute path to ld-linux.so.2 is hard-coded into the executable at link time, and can not be easily changed after the link is done (Update: can be done with patchelf; see this answer below).
To build an executable that will work with the new glibc, do this:
g++ main.o -o myapp ... \
-Wl,--rpath=/path/to/newglibc \
-Wl,--dynamic-linker=/path/to/newglibc/ld-linux.so.2
The -rpath
linker option will make the runtime loader search for libraries in /path/to/newglibc
(so you wouldn’t have to set LD_LIBRARY_PATH
before running it), and the -dynamic-linker
option will “bake” path to correct ld-linux.so.2
into the application.
If you can’t relink the myapp
application (e.g. because it is a third-party binary), not all is lost, but it gets trickier. One solution is to set a proper chroot
environment for it. Another possibility is to use rtldi and a binary editor. Update: or you can use patchelf.