8.26. GCC-12.2.0

8.26.1. Installation of GCC

If building on x86_64, change the default directory name for 64-bit libraries to “lib”:

case $(uname -m) in
  x86_64)
    sed -e '/m64=/s/lib64/lib/' \
        -i.orig gcc/config/i386/t-linux64
  ;;
esac

The GCC documentation recommends building GCC in a dedicated build directory:

mkdir -v build
cd       build

Prepare GCC for compilation:

../configure --prefix=/usr            \
             LD=ld                    \
             --enable-languages=c,c++ \
             --enable-default-pie     \
             --enable-default-ssp     \
             --disable-multilib       \
             --disable-bootstrap      \
             --with-system-zlib

GCC supports seven different computer languages, but the prerequisites for most of them have not yet been installed. See the BLFS Book GCC page for instructions on how to build all of GCC's supported languages.

Compile the package:

make

One set of tests in the GCC test suite is known to exhaust the default stack, so increase the stack size prior to running the tests:

ulimit -s 32768

Test the results as a non-privileged user, but do not stop at errors:

chown -Rv tester .
su tester -c "PATH=$PATH make -k check"

To extract a summary of the test suite results, run:

../contrib/test_summary

To filter out only the summaries, pipe the output through grep -A7 Summ.

Results can be compared with those located at https://www.linuxfromscratch.org/lfs/build-logs/11.3/ and https://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc-testresults/.

Eleven tests in the i386 test suite for the gcc compiler are known to FAIL. It's because the test files do not account for the --enable-default-pie option.

Four tests related to PR100400 may be reported as both XPASS and FAIL when testing the g++ compiler; the test file is not well written.

A few unexpected failures cannot always be avoided. The GCC developers are usually aware of these issues, but have not resolved them yet. Unless the test results are vastly different from those at the above URL, it is safe to continue.

Install the package:

make install

The GCC build directory is owned by tester now, and the ownership of the installed header directory (and its content) is incorrect. Change the ownership to the root user and group:

chown -v -R root:root \
    /usr/lib/gcc/$(gcc -dumpmachine)/12.2.0/include{,-fixed}

Create a symlink required by the FHS for "historical" reasons.

ln -svr /usr/bin/cpp /usr/lib

Add a compatibility symlink to enable building programs with Link Time Optimization (LTO):

ln -sfv ../../libexec/gcc/$(gcc -dumpmachine)/12.2.0/liblto_plugin.so \
        /usr/lib/bfd-plugins/

Now that our final toolchain is in place, it is important to again ensure that compiling and linking will work as expected. We do this by performing some sanity checks:

echo 'int main(){}' > dummy.c
cc dummy.c -v -Wl,--verbose &> dummy.log
readelf -l a.out | grep ': /lib'

There should be no errors, and the output of the last command will be (allowing for platform-specific differences in the dynamic linker name):

[Requesting program interpreter: /lib64/ld-linux-x86-64.so.2]

Now make sure that we're set up to use the correct start files:

grep -E -o '/usr/lib.*/S?crt[1in].*succeeded' dummy.log

The output of the last command should be:

/usr/lib/gcc/x86_64-pc-linux-gnu/12.2.0/../../../../lib/Scrt1.o succeeded
/usr/lib/gcc/x86_64-pc-linux-gnu/12.2.0/../../../../lib/crti.o succeeded
/usr/lib/gcc/x86_64-pc-linux-gnu/12.2.0/../../../../lib/crtn.o succeeded

Depending on your machine architecture, the above may differ slightly. The difference will be the name of the directory after /usr/lib/gcc. The important thing to look for here is that gcc has found all three crt*.o files under the /usr/lib directory.

Verify that the compiler is searching for the correct header files:

grep -B4 '^ /usr/include' dummy.log

This command should return the following output:

#include <...> search starts here:
 /usr/lib/gcc/x86_64-pc-linux-gnu/12.2.0/include
 /usr/local/include
 /usr/lib/gcc/x86_64-pc-linux-gnu/12.2.0/include-fixed
 /usr/include

Again, the directory named after your target triplet may be different than the above, depending on your system architecture.

Next, verify that the new linker is being used with the correct search paths:

grep 'SEARCH.*/usr/lib' dummy.log |sed 's|; |\n|g'

References to paths that have components with '-linux-gnu' should be ignored, but otherwise the output of the last command should be:

SEARCH_DIR("/usr/x86_64-pc-linux-gnu/lib64")
SEARCH_DIR("/usr/local/lib64")
SEARCH_DIR("/lib64")
SEARCH_DIR("/usr/lib64")
SEARCH_DIR("/usr/x86_64-pc-linux-gnu/lib")
SEARCH_DIR("/usr/local/lib")
SEARCH_DIR("/lib")
SEARCH_DIR("/usr/lib");

A 32-bit system may use a few other directories. For example, here is the output from an i686 machine:

SEARCH_DIR("/usr/i686-pc-linux-gnu/lib32")
SEARCH_DIR("/usr/local/lib32")
SEARCH_DIR("/lib32")
SEARCH_DIR("/usr/lib32")
SEARCH_DIR("/usr/i686-pc-linux-gnu/lib")
SEARCH_DIR("/usr/local/lib")
SEARCH_DIR("/lib")
SEARCH_DIR("/usr/lib");

Next make sure that we're using the correct libc:

grep "/lib.*/libc.so.6 " dummy.log

The output of the last command should be:

attempt to open /usr/lib/libc.so.6 succeeded

Make sure GCC is using the correct dynamic linker:

grep found dummy.log

The output of the last command should be (allowing for platform-specific differences in dynamic linker name):

found ld-linux-x86-64.so.2 at /usr/lib/ld-linux-x86-64.so.2

If the output does not appear as shown above or is not received at all, then something is seriously wrong. Investigate and retrace the steps to find out where the problem is and correct it. Any issues should be resolved before continuing with the process.

Once everything is working correctly, clean up the test files:

rm -v dummy.c a.out dummy.log

Finally, move a misplaced file:

mkdir -pv /usr/share/gdb/auto-load/usr/lib
mv -v /usr/lib/*gdb.py /usr/share/gdb/auto-load/usr/lib