Update: rumprun and php7

Months ago, I wrote about not being able to get libmemcached to link into a static PHP build.

I don’t take “no” for an answer from code.

I have not only gotten it to link (with a carefully targeted replacement of the linker in the build scripts), I have patched up opcache to both configure correctly while cross-compiling, and to build statically.

I seriously don’t take “no” for an answer from code.

That’s where I stand.  I’ve been focusing on getting some music done, notably this FF8 remix, so rumprun is on the back burner.  Still, the php7-full branch is what I would consider “usable” now.

If you’re reading this in the future, you should check the wiki for the status.

rumprun php7 experiment results

I forked rumprun-packages to build its php7 package with more features by default.  The original says it’s an “unmodified PHP 7.0.3” build, but it uses --disable-all to build with a minimal number of extensions by default, and that’s not really great for showing just what could work on rumprun.

I made a “mega” build which contains everything I can possibly include into it, including packaging up libjpeg-turbo and libpng so that this PHP can use gd.

I have been unable to get the memcached extension to work, though.  libmemcached-1.0 is written in C++ and depends on some exception-handling symbols.  PHP links with $(CC), which doesn’t include any C++ support.

I’d probably be more disappointed in this, except that I don’t know if rumprun PHP is all that useful.  Options are the single-threaded CLI HTTP server (not intended for production), or using ye olde php-cgi SAPI… which is also not a multithreaded option.  It expects to run single-threaded child processes under a FastCGI process manager.  (php-fpm simply integrates a process manager, so that you don’t need to find a separate one and integrate it; it’s also multi-process.)

And rumprun doesn’t have processes.  It’s a unikernel.