It was pointed out in [#23030](/bitcoin-bitcoin/23030/) that we might be able to get rid of our weak linking of getauxval() (HAVE_WEAK_GETAUXVAL) entirely, with only Android being a potential holdout:
I wonder if it's time to get rid of HAVE_WEAK_GETAUXVAL. I think it's confusing. Either we build against a C library that has this functionality, or not. We don't do this weak linking thing for any other symbols and recently got rid of the other glibc backwards compatibility stuff. Unless there is still a current platform that really needs it (Android?), I'd prefer to remove it from the build system, it has caused enough issues.
After looking at Android further, it would seem that given we are moving to using std::filesystem, which requires NDK version 22 and later, and getauxval has been available in the since API version 18, that shouldn't really be an issue. Support for API levels < 19 will be dropped with the NDK 24 release, and according to one website, supporting API level 18+ will cover ~99% of devices. Note that in the CI we currently build with NDK version 22 and API level 28.
The other change in this PR is removing the include of headers for ARM intrinsics, from the check for strong getauxval() support in configure, as they shouldn't be needed. Including these headers also meant that the check would basically only succeed when building for ARM. This would be an issue if we remove weak linking, as we wouldn't detect getauxval() as supported on other platforms. Note that we also use getauxval() in our RNG when it's available.
I've checked that with these changes we detect support for strong getauxval() on Alpine (muslibc). On Linux, previously we'd be detecting support for weak getauxval(), now we detect strong support. Note that we already require glibc 2.17, and getauxval() was introduced in 2.16.
This is an alternative / supersedes #23030.
