Building GCC 9.2.0 on CentOS 7

build-gcc-9.2.0-on-centos7.md

Building GCC 9.2.0 on CentOS 7

Introduction

CentOS 7 distribution (as well as RHEL 7) ships with a somewhat outdated version of the GCC compiler (4.8.5 on CentOS 7.5), which may not be suitable to your compilation requirements. For example, C11 - which supersedes C99 - is fully supported only starting from GCC 4.9).

Additionally, recent versions of GCC (GCC6, GCC7, GCC8, GCC9) come with improvements which help detect issues at build time and offer suggestions on how to fix them. Sometimes, these are even actually helpful!

This note describes how to build the latest GCC (9.2.0 as of October 2019) from sources on CentOS 7. This should be applicable as is on RHEL 7. For other Linux distributions, adapt as needed.

While this is not overly complicated, building GCC takes quite some time. So you might want to plan to do something else while it builds... a coffee break just won't make it.

Prerequisites

Prerequisites are described here: https://gcc.gnu.org/install/prerequisites.html

• C++ compiler

yum install gcc gcc-c++

Required support libraries, listed hereafter, can be downloaded automatically using script download_prerequisites included in the GCC archive. It's convenient, so we'll do that.

• GNU Multiple Precision Library (GMP) version 4.3.2 (or later)
• MPFR Library version 2.4.2 (or later)
• MPC Library version 0.8.1 (or later)
• ISL library version 0.15 (or later)

Build and install gcc

cd /home/build
GCC_VERSION=9.2.0
wget https://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/gcc/gcc-${GCC_VERSION}/gcc-${GCC_VERSION}.tar.gz
tar xzvf gcc-${GCC_VERSION}.tar.gz
mkdir obj.gcc-${GCC_VERSION}
cd gcc-${GCC_VERSION}
./contrib/download_prerequisites
cd ../obj.gcc-${GCC_VERSION}
../gcc-${GCC_VERSION}/configure --disable-multilib --enable-languages=c,c++
make -j $(nproc)
make install

Notes:

• If you have several processors available, you can benefit from a parallel build. For example, make -j 6 will use 6 CPUs. (You might want to save a few for yourself, so you can do things on your server while gcc builds.)
• Make sure you have enough space in /home/build (or whatever location you choose). You will need ~1 GB for gcc sources, ~6 GB for the build). Be prepared.
• This will install gcc in /usr/local/bin/gcc (default prefix is /usr/local). Your distro gcc (/usr/bin/gcc) will not be overwritten, but if later on you need to invoke it, you will have to do so explicitly. Configure with option --prefix if you want to change this.
• Option --disable-multilib prevents building multiple target libraries (I don't need them, and it is simpler).
• Option --enable-langagues allows to have a leaner and faster build if you only need (for example) C and C++.
• See GCC documentation for the full list of configure options.

Thanks for the guide. I added the program suffix option (so my gcc was installed as gcc-9.2.0). I was hoping to use this for compiling C++ programs, but I'm getting errors relating to linking c++ standard libraries. Now normally gcc has everything set up nicely through the g++ command, but I'm wondering what steps I might have to do to get C++ standard libraries to work?

When you say "linking c++ standard libraries" are you talking about the STL and libstdc++, or are you talking about C++ libraries on the system provided by the distro?

If it's the latter, and you're on centos7, you probably need to enable the old ABI. Use the compiler flag -D_GLIBXX_USE_CXX11_ABI=0 to set a define that is needed in order to interop with system libraries on centos7 that were built using the pre-c++11 ABI.

https://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/libstdc++/manual/using_dual_abi.html

@s-iyengar is that related to what you ran into?

Great guide.
To enable gcc 9 as default, may have to run the following commands:

sudo yum install devtoolset-9-toolchain
scl enable devtoolset-9 bash

A couple more steps are needed to install the gcc 9 libraries as well:

yum install centos-release-scl -y
yum clean all
yum install devtoolset-9-* -y
scl enable devtoolset-9 bash

This helped, Thank you!

This helped a lot.

Great guide. To enable gcc 9 as default, may have to run the following commands:

sudo yum install devtoolset-9-toolchain
scl enable devtoolset-9 bash

I have a question plz. If we can install the entire devtoolset-9-* which includes gcc 9 too, will it still be necessary to build gcc from source?

Great guide. To enable gcc 9 as default, may have to run the following commands:

sudo yum install devtoolset-9-toolchain
scl enable devtoolset-9 bash

I have a question plz. If we can install the entire devtoolset-9-* which includes gcc 9 too, will it still be necessary to build gcc from source?

If you install devtoolset with a recent version of gcc already built, then of course there is no need to build it yourself. :)
Unless you really need a version more recent that what is provided with the devtoolset.

Great guide. To enable gcc 9 as default, may have to run the following commands:

sudo yum install devtoolset-9-toolchain
scl enable devtoolset-9 bash

I have a question plz. If we can install the entire devtoolset-9-* which includes gcc 9 too, will it still be necessary to build gcc from source?

If you install devtoolset with a recent version of gcc already built, then of course there is no need to build it yourself. :) Unless you really need a version more recent that what is provided with the devtoolset.

That is correct. I did build gcc-11 from source as per instructions. But in the end I used devtoolset-11-* and things seems to work ...
Thanks

Hi
I got those errors:

make -j $(nproc) > install.log
In file included from ../../../gcc-9.2.0/libcpp/system.h:32:0,
                 from ../../../gcc-9.2.0/libcpp/directives.c:22:
/usr/lib/gcc/x86_64-linux-gnu/4.8.5/include/stdint.h:9:26: fatal error: stdint.h: No such file or directory
 # include_next <stdint.h>
                          ^
compilation terminated.
In file included from ../../gcc-9.2.0/libcpp/system.h:32:0,
                 from ../../gcc-9.2.0/libcpp/charset.c:21:
/usr/lib/gcc/x86_64-linux-gnu/4.8.5/include/stdint.h:9:26: fatal error: stdint.h: No such file or directory
 # include_next <stdint.h>
                          ^
compilation terminated.
In file included from ../../../gcc-9.2.0/libcpp/system.h:32:0,
                 from ../../../gcc-9.2.0/libcpp/charset.c:21:
/usr/lib/gcc/x86_64-linux-gnu/4.8.5/include/stdint.h:9:26: fatal error: stdint.h: No such file or directory
 # include_next <stdint.h>
                         ^

and the errors list is very long. I'm on centos 7

uname  -a
Linux myserver 3.10.0-1062.9.1.el7.x86_64 #1 SMP

do you have any ideas about this?

QQQ~

thanks, great guides