GoKawiilSoLo — a .so loader for static Linux binaries
Ship one musl-linked executable. At runtime, load the user's existing glibc-linked GPU driver. No container, no AppImage, and no second libc in the process.
Static binaries are a wonderfully boring way to deploy software on Linux: one file, no dependencies, nothing to break. We build ours with IX, a source-first build system for producing fully static Linux binaries. The boredom ends the moment the application needs the GPU: Vulkan and OpenGL drivers are supplied by the host as shared objects, usually built against glibc, and a fully static musl binary cannot normally dlopen() them.
SoLo crosses that boundary. It provides a dlfcn -style source API backed by its own ELF loader (x86-64 and aarch64) and a glibc ABI bridge implemented on top of musl. The result is still one ordinary static executable, but it can use the graphics driver already installed on the machine.
The repository includes an end-to-end Vulkan proof: a fully static executable loads the host's unmodified Vulkan driver, runs a compute shader, and writes the result to a PNG. Tested on AMD radv, radeonsi, Intel, and NVIDIA GPUs under Linux, and on Apple M1 under Asahi Linux.
The host keeps the hardware-specific code. You ship everything else.
And not on a demo's word alone: on every commit, CI loads the shared libraries of the 1,000 most-installed Debian packages — over 2,100 host objects — through SoLo, on both x86-64 and aarch64.
See it work
Grab the prebuilt binary — no clone, no toolchain, any Linux with a Vulkan driver installed ( mesa-vulkan-drivers is enough):
curl -LO https://github.com/pg83/solo/releases/latest/download/vulkan-x86_64 chmod +x vulkan-x86_64 ./vulkan-x86_64 hello.png
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