All the story began from trying to use Copilot with Neovim on an old computing cluster where the glibc version is quite old.
To use Copilot with Neovim, we need to have Node.js >= 18.x, and Node.js >= 18.x demands glibc >=2.28.
First, I downloaded Node.js 18.20.6 which is a pre-built version, which means we can directly run it after unzipping the tar ball.
wget https://nodejs.org/download/release/v18.20.6/node-v18.20.6-linux-x64.tar.gz
tar zxvf node-v18.20.6-linux-x64.tar.gz
cd node-v18.20.6-linux-x64/bin
./node --version
However, on my old computing cluster, the glibc is too old.
Therefore, if I try to run ./node --version at node-v18.20.5-linux-x64/bin, I get
./node: /lib64/libm.so.6: version `GLIBC_2.27' not found (required by ./node)
./node: /lib64/libc.so.6: version `GLIBC_2.25' not found (required by ./node)
./node: /lib64/libc.so.6: version `GLIBC_2.28' not found (required by ./node)
As a normal user of the computing cluster, I obviously don’t have the sudo privilege, but I could compile a newer glibc in my local directory.
Again, I downloaded a newer glibc, specifically glibc 2.38, unzipped it and compile it to a local directory that I can write to.
tar xvzf glibc-2.38.tar.gz
cd glibc-2.38
mkdir build
cd build
../configure --prefix=$HOME/local/glibc-2.38
make -j$(nproc)
make install
Some people might believe that if they add the newer glibc into the environment variable, LD_LIBRARY_PATH, everything will be fine and so will Node.js and Copilot with Neovim.
However, I found that if I do
## Don't do this in your .bashrc or .zshrc!!!!
## Don't try to replace your old glibc with the newer version
## Otherwise, you cannot change it back easily if you don't have other terminals available without this change.
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$HOME/local/glibc-2.38/lib:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH
I couldn’t even ls a directory but got Segmentation Fault.
To solve this issue, the best solution I found is to call $HOME/local/glibc-2.38/lib/ld-linux-x86-64.so.2 /path/to/Node.js/bin/node instead of calling /path/to/Node.js/bin/node directly.
Specifically, here is what I did
mkdir -p $HOME/local/bin
cd $HOME/local/bin
ln -s /path/to/Node.js/bin/* . ## link all the commands to this new directory
rm node ## remove node, because we'd like to change it
nvim node ## Open and edit a new file named node
In this new file, I wrote
#!/bin/bash
$HOME/local/glibc-2.38/lib/ld-linux-x86-64.so.2 /path/to/Node.js/bin/node "$@"
Save it and exit Neovim. Make sure that $HOME/local/bin is in the front of your PATH.
You may check it by which node, and got $HOME/local/bin/node.
Now let’s try node --version, and I got v18.20.5. Brilliant, we finally got Node.js 18.x work and Copilot should also work in Neovim now.
How it works? Well, I am not hundred percent sure, but the essential principle would be every time we call ld-linux-x86-64.so.2 node, the newer glibc is applied for linked for node, so that demand of having newer version of glibc is fulfilled.