Compiling MySQL 5.6 & 5.7 on Ubuntu 22.04

One of my hobbies is testing open source DBMS for CPU regressions and for that I want to compare perf between old and new versions of the DBMS. Depending on the DBMS it can be a challenge to build the old DBMS with the current (modern) compiler toolchain. 

Using open source frequently means compiling from source and compiling from source eventually means debugging a failed build. Alas, the proliferation of build tools means you are likely to be debugging a build tool you know little about. For me that included svn+MongoDB, cmake+MySQL, make/configure+MySQL, mvn+Linkbench, mvn+First_Robotics and make+RocksDB. Perhaps my debugging would be easier if there weren't as many build tools.

Postgres might be an exception WRT compiling old versions - it works great. Alas, this isn't as easy with MySQL versions 5.6.51 and 5.7.39. Note that MySQL 5.6 reached end of life in 2021 but 5.7 doesn't reach that until next year. For MySQL 5.6, 5.7 and perhaps some 8.0 releases prior to 8.0.31, there is a common error -- cmake fails with a message about being unable to find ssl and a suggestion to install it. 

CMake Error at cmake/ssl.cmake:63 (MESSAGE):

  Please install the appropriate openssl developer package.

Call Stack (most recent call first):

  cmake/ssl.cmake:306 (FATAL_SSL_NOT_FOUND_ERROR)

  CMakeLists.txt:603 (MYSQL_CHECK_SSL)

This occurs on Ubuntu 22.04.1 with gcc 11.3.0 and OpenSSL was definitely installed, and used when I compiled MySQL 8.0.31 from source. The problem is there are several conditions that trigger the error message and one of them occurs when the version number is wrong or the version number cannot be parsed from a header. So a better error message would make debugging easier in the future.

For 5.7.39 I fixed the error by backporting code from 8.0.31 that parses the SSL version numbers from openssl/openslv.h. A diff for that is here. Perhaps the real fix needed is smaller but I was in copy/paste mode given my lack of cmake skills.

For 5.6.51 I fixed the error in the same way and then added --std=c++11 to the CXX flags because some code uses the register keyword which is no longer a thing in C++ 2017. A diff for that is here. Output from the compiler error before --std=c++11 was added is here.

For MySQL 8.0.28 a diff to help the build find SSL is here. Unfortunately, it looks like MySQL 8.0.28 cannot compile with OpenSSL 3.X and expects something older. Errors are here. Looks like MySQL 8 was made aware of OpenSSL 3 in 8.0.30 (see here).

Updates:

• Filed bug 109251, must stay ahead of Vilnius DB in the bug reporter contest
• Compiling FB MySQL 5.6.35 was even more fun, see below

Compiling FB MySQL 5.6.35

A diff to make this work is here. I had to modify cmake/ssl.cmake as explained above and storage/rocksdb/get_rocksdb_files.sh.  The cmake command line is here.

I also did cd rocksdb; make static_lib to generate rocksdb/util/build_version.cc because the automation to do that was not working, but after I applied the diff listed above that wasn't needed.

Compiling FB MySQL 8.0.28

I needed a small diff to edit storage/rocksdb/get_rocksdb_files.sh and fix a few other bugs similar to what was done for FB MySQL 5.6.35 above. The cmake command line is here.

While boost is installed by git submodule update I am not sure that works for my OSS builds and/or cmake command line (-DWITH_BOOST=$PWD/../boost). So I just do:

  cd $SRC_ROOT; mv boost boost.up; cp -p -r ~/mysql-8.0.28/boost .