5.7. Installing GCC-3.3.1 - Pass 1

Estimated build time:           4.4 SBU
Estimated required disk space:  300 MB

5.7.1. Contents of GCC

The GCC package contains the GNU compiler collection, including the C and C++ compilers.

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

5.7.2.

5.7.3. GCC Installation Dependencies

GCC depends on: Bash, Binutils, Coreutils, Diffutils, Findutils, Gawk, Gettext, Glibc, Grep, Make, Perl, Sed, Texinfo.

5.7.4.

5.7.5. Installation of GCC

Unpack only the GCC-core tarball, as we won't be needing a C++ compiler for the moment.

Note

Even though GCC is an important toolchain package, we are not going to run the test suite at this early stage. First, the test suite framework is not yet in place and second, the programs from this first pass will soon be overwritten by those installed in the second pass.

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 unsetting or modifying them when building GCC.

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

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

Prepare GCC for compilation:

../gcc-3.3.1/configure --prefix=/tools \
    --with-local-prefix=/tools \
    --disable-nls --enable-shared \
    --enable-languages=c

The meaning of the configure options:

Continue with compiling the package:

make BOOT_LDFLAGS="-static" bootstrap

The meaning of the make parameters:

And install the package:

make install

As a finishing touch we'll create the /tools/bin/cc symlink. Many programs and scripts run cc instead of gcc, a thing meant to keep programs generic and therefore usable on all kinds of Unix systems. Not everybody has the GNU C compiler installed. Simply running cc leaves the system administrator free to decide what C compiler to install, as long as there's a symlink pointing to it:

ln -sf gcc /tools/bin/cc