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Open Client/Server and ESQL/C 12.5.1 64bit Certified on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3.0 Itanium2

64bit Open Client/Server 12.5.1 and ESQL/C 12.5.1 have been certified on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3.0 Itanium2. This technote provides certification details and restrictions. 
 
Certification Details
Operating System	Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3.0 Itanium2
Platform	Linux
Sybase Products	Open Client/Server, ESQL/C for Red Hat Linux AS 2.1
Version of Sybase Products	12.5.1
Certification result (pass/fail)	Pass with restrictions 
Certification date	March 19, 2004
Compiler	gcc (GCC) 3.2.3 20030502 (Red Hat Linux 3.2.3-20)
Kernel	2.4.21-4.EL #1 SMP Fri Oct 3 17:29:39 EDT 2003 ia64 ia64 ia64 GNU/Linux
Glibc	Version 2.3.2, Release 95.3. 
Restrictions
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3 includes the Native POSIX Thread Library (NPTL), a new implementation of POSIX threads for Linux.  An environment variable
"LD_ASSUME_KERNEL=2.4.19" is required to trigger use of the older LinuxThreads threading implementation, before using Sybase threaded libraries.

The code samples provided with the release (dblibrary, ctlibrary, srvlibrary and so on) for Red Hat Enterprise 3.0 can only be relinked with the OC/S shared libraries (.so). The header file ctype.h against which the OC/S libraries are compiled on Red Hat AS 2.1 is incompatible with the header file on Red Hat Enterprise 3.0. Attempts to link the samples with the static OC/S libraries (.a) will result in linking errors like the following: 
/sybase/OCS_125/lib/libsybdb.a(dbcursut.o)(.text+0x133): In function 
`db__crs_search_phrase': 
: undefined reference to `__ctype_tolower' 
/sybase/OCS_125/lib/libsybdb.a(intnent.o)(.text+0xd2): In function 
`intl_nextentry': 
: undefined reference to `__ctype_b' 

Red Hat is tracking this issue under bug 91290 for Red Hat 9.0 (Red Hat Enterprise 3.0 is at the same glibc level (2.3.2) as Red Hat 9.0). Details are available from Red Hat at 
  http://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=91290 

Also see Red Hat's bug report concerning bug 86465 on Red Hat 8.0. Comment #10 of bug 86465 explains Red Hat's position regarding the compatibility of shared and static libraries between major releases: 
"On RHL9 this is not a bug. There is no binary compatibility for .a libraries or .o files between distribution major releases (glibc only ensures binary compatibility for programs and shared libraries using symbol versioning, for static libraries this cannot work)."