Distroless Compatibility

[marcusdarmstrong]

Hey folks, following the 2025-03-10 release workerd fails to run in a distroless/base-debian12 container due to:
workerd: error while loading shared libraries: libatomic.so.1: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

This is presumably due to the v8 upgrade https://github.com/cloudflare/workerd/pull/3630/files#diff-bf1f7c8c791ce80f265c8017963279e4048ed6491900acc21cb097287b2c70ec adding the -latomic flag but I'm curious if there's a path toward making this viable again.

[isker]

Hi @erikcorry, since you ran that v8 upgrade, do you have any thoughts on this situation? Either this lib was previously statically linked or was just not used, I'm not sure :).

[erikcorry]

This is a change we got from Google, not sure why it's needed. The GN build doesn't have it except on riscv.

I made #3891 as an experiment to see if we can simply remove it again.

[isker]

Thanks for that! This also made me understand why nodejs distroless images are not affected by this problem (or will not be, when nodejs manages to upgrade): because nodejs don't build v8 with bazel.