Approximate build time:  11.7 SBU
Required disk space:     294 MB

This package is known to behave badly when you have changed its default optimization flags (including the -march and -mcpu options). Therefore, if you have defined any environment variables that override default optimizations, such as CFLAGS and CXXFLAGS, we recommend un-setting or modifying them when building GCC.

Unpack the GCC-core and the GCC-g++ tarball -- they will unfold into the same directory. You should likewise extract the GCC-testsuite package. The full GCC package contains even more compilers. Instructions for building these can be found at http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/blfs/view/stable/general/gcc.html.

First apply only the No-Fixincludes patch (and not the Specs patch) also used in the previous chapter:

patch -Np1 -i ../gcc-3.3.3-no_fixincludes-1.patch

Now apply a sed substitution that will suppress the installation of libiberty.a. We want to use the version of libiberty.a provided by Binutils:

sed -i 's/install_to_$(INSTALL_DEST) //' libiberty/Makefile.in

The GCC documentation recommends building GCC outside of the source directory in a dedicated build directory:

mkdir ../gcc-build
cd ../gcc-build

Now prepare GCC for compilation:

../gcc-3.3.3/configure --prefix=/usr \
    --enable-shared --enable-threads=posix \
    --enable-__cxa_atexit --enable-clocale=gnu \
    --enable-languages=c,c++

Compile the package:

make

Test the results, but don't stop at errors (you'll remember the few known ones):

make -k check

The test suite notes from the section called “GCC-3.3.3 - Pass 2” are still very much appropriate here. Be sure to refer back there should you have any doubts.

Now install the package:

make install

Some packages expect the C PreProcessor to be installed in the /lib directory. To support those packages, create this symlink:

ln -s ../usr/bin/cpp /lib

Many packages use the name cc to call the C compiler. To satisfy those packages, create a symlink:

ln -s gcc /usr/bin/cc

Installed programs: c++, cc (link to gcc), cc1, cc1plus, collect2, cpp, g++, gcc, gccbug, and gcov

Installed libraries: libgcc.a, libgcc_eh.a, libgcc_s.so, libstdc++.[a,so] and libsupc++.a

cpp is the C preprocessor. It is used by the compiler to have the #include and #define and such statements expanded in the source files.

g++ is the C++ compiler.

gcc is the C compiler. It is used to translate the source code of a program into assembly code.

gccbug is a shell script used to help create good bug reports.

gcov is a coverage testing tool. It is used to analyze programs to find out where optimizations will have the most effect.

libgcc* contains run-time support for gcc.

libstdc++ is the standard C++ library. It contains many frequently-used functions.

libsupc++ provides supporting routines for the c++ programming language.