This repo provides a (reasonably) portable, relocatable x86_64-pc-linux-gnu gcc which can be used to bootstrap builds of other tools.

Versions

• gcc-6_3_0

Compatability

Will run on most glibc x86_64 linux distros since 2007 cf. Holy Build Box

The release tarball can be extracted in any convenient location.

Building

If you do not want to use the tarball above, it can be recreated by

• installing docker / verifying that the docker command line tool works
• cloning this repo
• running cmake -- downloads gcc fork & runs docker with various local dirs correctly mounted
• tarball will be in the build directory in about hour

Motivation

My preferred toolchain is a custom built clang. This repo provides a known valid bootstrap compiler for this toolchain. Having pre-made binaries reduces build times, also simplifying travis time limit issues.

N.B.: This gcc is probably not useful for building most types of software. At the very least such software should have some way to find the compiler's shared libs (e.g. libstdc++.so and libgcc_s.so), perhaps by building it with rpath's or running it w/ LD_LIBRARY_PATH, both of which are completely tedious. However, in building my clang toolchain, the first step is to build a transient clang (with this gcc and which has rpath's to the correct libs), and then the transient clang is used to build one or more "proper" clangs. (N.B.: this example is a little contrived. Using --static-libgcc and --static-libstdc++ would also have been helpful. But really, this gcc is best used for building transient software, and, in general, this probably means bootstrapping other c/c++ compilers.)

Among other things, this allows for creating sysroots that are libgcc* free, and can be used to create pure clang based distros (which I am not interested, but you might be...).

Issues

Despite being able to leverage the wonderful Holy Build Box, building a portable gcc is a bit of a tricky thing to do. If you encounter issues such as

• Complaints related to __locale
• Missing crt*.o files
• Missing headers

then please consider filing an Issue, as I would be be curious to know more details.