Host/target specific installation notes for GCC#

Please read this document carefully before installing the GNU Compiler Collection on your machine.

Note that this list of install notes is not a list of supported hosts or targets. Not all supported hosts and targets are listed here, only the ones that require host-specific or target-specific information have to.

aarch64*-*-*#

Binutils pre 2.24 does not have support for selecting -mabi and does not support ILP32. If it is used to build GCC 4.9 or later, GCC will not support option -mabi=ilp32.

To enable a workaround for the Cortex-A53 erratum number 835769 by default (for all CPUs regardless of -mcpu option given) at configure time use the --enable-fix-cortex-a53-835769 option. This will enable the fix by default and can be explicitly disabled during compilation by passing the -mno-fix-cortex-a53-835769 option. Conversely, --disable-fix-cortex-a53-835769 will disable the workaround by default. The workaround is disabled by default if neither of --enable-fix-cortex-a53-835769 or --disable-fix-cortex-a53-835769 is given at configure time.

To enable a workaround for the Cortex-A53 erratum number 843419 by default (for all CPUs regardless of -mcpu option given) at configure time use the --enable-fix-cortex-a53-843419 option. This workaround is applied at link time. Enabling the workaround will cause GCC to pass the relevant option to the linker. It can be explicitly disabled during compilation by passing the -mno-fix-cortex-a53-843419 option. Conversely, --disable-fix-cortex-a53-843419 will disable the workaround by default. The workaround is disabled by default if neither of --enable-fix-cortex-a53-843419 or --disable-fix-cortex-a53-843419 is given at configure time.

To enable Branch Target Identification Mechanism and Return Address Signing by default at configure time use the --enable-standard-branch-protection option. This is equivalent to having -mbranch-protection=standard during compilation. This can be explicitly disabled during compilation by passing the -mbranch-protection=none option which turns off all types of branch protections. Conversely, --disable-standard-branch-protection will disable both the protections by default. This mechanism is turned off by default if neither of the options are given at configure time.

alpha*-*-*#

This section contains general configuration information for all Alpha-based platforms using ELF. In addition to reading this section, please read all other sections that match your target.

amd64-*-solaris2*#

This is a synonym for x86_64-*-solaris2*.

amdgcn-*-amdhsa#

AMD GCN GPU target.

Instead of GNU Binutils, you will need to install LLVM 13.0.1, or later, and copy bin/llvm-mc to amdgcn-amdhsa/bin/as, bin/lld to amdgcn-amdhsa/bin/ld, bin/llvm-nm to amdgcn-amdhsa/bin/nm, and bin/llvm-ar to both bin/amdgcn-amdhsa-ar and bin/amdgcn-amdhsa-ranlib.

Use Newlib (3.2.0, or newer).

To run the binaries, install the HSA Runtime from the ROCm Platform, and use libexec/gcc/amdhsa-amdhsa/version/gcn-run to launch them on the GPU.

arc-*-elf32#

Use configure --target=arc-elf32 --with-cpu=cpu --enable-languages="c,c++" to configure GCC, with cpu being one of arc600, arc601, or arc700.

arc-linux-uclibc#

Use configure --target=arc-linux-uclibc --with-cpu=arc700 --enable-languages="c,c++" to configure GCC.

arm-*-eabi#

ARM-family processors.

Building the Ada frontend commonly fails (an infinite loop executing xsinfo) if the host compiler is GNAT 4.8. Host compilers built from the GNAT 4.6, 4.9 or 5 release branches are known to succeed.

avr#

ATMEL AVR-family micro controllers. These are used in embedded applications. There are no standard Unix configurations. See AVR Options, for the list of supported MCU types.

Use configure --target=avr --enable-languages="c" to configure GCC.

Further installation notes and other useful information about AVR tools can also be obtained from:

The following error:

Error: register required

indicates that you should upgrade to a newer version of the binutils.

Blackfin#

The Blackfin processor, an Analog Devices DSP. See Blackfin Options,

More information, and a version of binutils with support for this processor, are available at https://sourceforge.net/projects/adi-toolchain/.

CRIS#

CRIS is a CPU architecture in Axis Communications systems-on-a-chip, for example the ETRAX series. These are used in embedded applications.

See CRIS Options, for a list of CRIS-specific options.

Use configure --target=cris-elf to configure GCCfor building a cross-compiler for CRIS.

DOS#

Please have a look at the binaries page.

You cannot install GCC by itself on MSDOS; it will not compile under any MSDOS compiler except itself. You need to get the complete compilation package DJGPP, which includes binaries as well as sources, and includes all the necessary compilation tools and libraries.

epiphany-*-elf#

Adapteva Epiphany. This configuration is intended for embedded systems.

*-*-freebsd*#

In order to better utilize FreeBSD base system functionality and match the configuration of the system compiler, GCC 4.5 and above as well as GCC 4.4 past 2010-06-20 leverage SSP support in libc (which is present on FreeBSD 7 or later) and the use of __cxa_atexit by default (on FreeBSD 6 or later). The use of dl_iterate_phdr inside libgcc_s.so.1 and boehm-gc (on FreeBSD 7 or later) is enabled by GCC 4.5 and above.

We support FreeBSD using the ELF file format with DWARF 2 debugging for all CPU architectures. There are no known issues with mixing object files and libraries with different debugging formats. Otherwise, this release of GCC should now match more of the configuration used in the stock FreeBSD configuration of GCC. In particular, --enable-threads is now configured by default. However, as a general user, do not attempt to replace the system compiler with this release. Known to bootstrap and check with good results on FreeBSD 7.2-STABLE. In the past, known to bootstrap and check with good results on FreeBSD 3.0, 3.4, 4.0, 4.2, 4.3, 4.4, 4.5, 4.8, 4.9 and 5-CURRENT.

The version of binutils installed in /usr/bin probably works with this release of GCC. Bootstrapping against the latest GNU binutils and/or the version found in /usr/ports/devel/binutils has been known to enable additional features and improve overall testsuite results. However, it is currently known that boehm-gc may not configure properly on FreeBSD prior to the FreeBSD 7.0 release with GNU binutils after 2.16.1.

ft32-*-elf#

The FT32 processor. This configuration is intended for embedded systems.

h8300-hms#

Renesas H8/300 series of processors.

Please have a look at the binaries page.

The calling convention and structure layout has changed in release 2.6. All code must be recompiled. The calling convention now passes the first three arguments in function calls in registers. Structures are no longer a multiple of 2 bytes.

hppa*-hp-hpux*#

Support for HP-UX version 9 and older was discontinued in GCC 3.4.

We require using gas/binutils on all hppa platforms. Version 2.19 or later is recommended.

It may be helpful to configure GCC with the --with-gnu-as and --with-as=... options to ensure that GCC can find GAS.

The HP assembler should not be used with GCC. It is rarely tested and may not work. It shouldn’t be used with any languages other than C due to its many limitations.

Specifically, -g does not work (HP-UX uses a peculiar debugging format which GCC does not know about). It also inserts timestamps into each object file it creates, causing the 3-stage comparison test to fail during a bootstrap. You should be able to continue by saying make all-host all-target after getting the failure from make.

Various GCC features are not supported. For example, it does not support weak symbols or alias definitions. As a result, explicit template instantiations are required when using C++. This makes it difficult if not impossible to build many C++ applications.

There are two default scheduling models for instructions. These are PROCESSOR_7100LC and PROCESSOR_8000. They are selected from the pa-risc architecture specified for the target machine when configuring. PROCESSOR_8000 is the default. PROCESSOR_7100LC is selected when the target is a hppa1* machine.

The PROCESSOR_8000 model is not well suited to older processors. Thus, it is important to completely specify the machine architecture when configuring if you want a model other than PROCESSOR_8000. The macro TARGET_SCHED_DEFAULT can be defined in BOOT_CFLAGS if a different default scheduling model is desired.

As of GCC 4.0, GCC uses the UNIX 95 namespace for HP-UX 10.10 through 11.00, and the UNIX 98 namespace for HP-UX 11.11 and later. This namespace change might cause problems when bootstrapping with an earlier version of GCC or the HP compiler as essentially the same namespace is required for an entire build. This problem can be avoided in a number of ways. With HP cc, UNIX_STD can be set to 95 or 98. Another way is to add an appropriate set of predefines to CC. The description for the munix= option contains a list of the predefines used with each standard.

More specific information to hppa*-hp-hpux* targets follows.

hppa*-hp-hpux10#

For hpux10.20, we highly recommend you pick up the latest sed patch PHCO_19798 from HP.

The C++ ABI has changed incompatibly in GCC 4.0. COMDAT subspaces are used for one-only code and data. This resolves many of the previous problems in using C++ on this target. However, the ABI is not compatible with the one implemented under HP-UX 11 using secondary definitions.

hppa*-hp-hpux11#

GCC 3.0 and up support HP-UX 11. GCC 2.95.x is not supported and cannot be used to compile GCC 3.0 and up.

The libffi library haven’t been ported to 64-bit HP-UXand doesn’t build.

Refer to binaries page for information about obtaining precompiled GCC binaries for HP-UX. Precompiled binaries must be obtained to build the Ada language as it cannot be bootstrapped using C. Ada is only available for the 32-bit PA-RISC runtime.

Starting with GCC 3.4 an ISO C compiler is required to bootstrap. The bundled compiler supports only traditional C; you will need either HP’s unbundled compiler, or a binary distribution of GCC.

It is possible to build GCC 3.3 starting with the bundled HP compiler, but the process requires several steps. GCC 3.3 can then be used to build later versions.

There are several possible approaches to building the distribution. Binutils can be built first using the HP tools. Then, the GCC distribution can be built. The second approach is to build GCC first using the HP tools, then build binutils, then rebuild GCC. There have been problems with various binary distributions, so it is best not to start from a binary distribution.

On 64-bit capable systems, there are two distinct targets. Different installation prefixes must be used if both are to be installed on the same system. The hppa[1-2]*-hp-hpux11* target generates code for the 32-bit PA-RISC runtime architecture and uses the HP linker. The hppa64-hp-hpux11* target generates 64-bit code for the PA-RISC 2.0 architecture.

The script config.guess now selects the target type based on the compiler detected during configuration. You must define PATH or CC so that configure finds an appropriate compiler for the initial bootstrap. When CC is used, the definition should contain the options that are needed whenever CC is used.

Specifically, options that determine the runtime architecture must be in CC to correctly select the target for the build. It is also convenient to place many other compiler options in CC. For example, CC="cc -Ac +DA2.0W -Wp,-H16376 -D_CLASSIC_TYPES -D_HPUX_SOURCE" can be used to bootstrap the GCC 3.3 branch with the HP compiler in 64-bit K&R/bundled mode. The +DA2.0W option will result in the automatic selection of the hppa64-hp-hpux11* target. The macro definition table of cpp needs to be increased for a successful build with the HP compiler. _CLASSIC_TYPES and _HPUX_SOURCE need to be defined when building with the bundled compiler, or when using the -Ac option. These defines aren’t necessary with -Ae.

It is best to explicitly configure the hppa64-hp-hpux11* target with the --with-ld=... option. This overrides the standard search for ld. The two linkers supported on this target require different commands. The default linker is determined during configuration. As a result, it’s not possible to switch linkers in the middle of a GCC build. This has been reported to sometimes occur in unified builds of binutils and GCC.

A recent linker patch must be installed for the correct operation of GCC 3.3 and later. PHSS_26559 and PHSS_24304 are the oldest linker patches that are known to work. They are for HP-UX 11.00 and 11.11, respectively. PHSS_24303, the companion to PHSS_24304, might be usable but it hasn’t been tested. These patches have been superseded. Consult the HP patch database to obtain the currently recommended linker patch for your system.

The patches are necessary for the support of weak symbols on the 32-bit port, and for the running of initializers and finalizers. Weak symbols are implemented using SOM secondary definition symbols. Prior to HP-UX 11, there are bugs in the linker support for secondary symbols. The patches correct a problem of linker core dumps creating shared libraries containing secondary symbols, as well as various other linking issues involving secondary symbols.

GCC 3.3 uses the ELF DT_INIT_ARRAY and DT_FINI_ARRAY capabilities to run initializers and finalizers on the 64-bit port. The 32-bit port uses the linker +init and +fini options for the same purpose. The patches correct various problems with the +init/+fini options, including program core dumps. Binutils 2.14 corrects a problem on the 64-bit port resulting from HP’s non-standard use of the .init and .fini sections for array initializers and finalizers.

Although the HP and GNU linkers are both supported for the hppa64-hp-hpux11* target, it is strongly recommended that the HP linker be used for link editing on this target.

At this time, the GNU linker does not support the creation of long branch stubs. As a result, it cannot successfully link binaries containing branch offsets larger than 8 megabytes. In addition, there are problems linking shared libraries, linking executables with -static, and with dwarf2 unwind and exception support. It also doesn’t provide stubs for internal calls to global functions in shared libraries, so these calls cannot be overloaded.

The HP dynamic loader does not support GNU symbol versioning, so symbol versioning is not supported. It may be necessary to disable symbol versioning with --disable-symvers when using GNU ld.

POSIX threads are the default. The optional DCE thread library is not supported, so --enable-threads=dce does not work.

*-*-linux-gnu#

The .init_array and .fini_array sections are enabled unconditionally which requires at least glibc 2.1 and binutils 2.12.

Versions of libstdc++-v3 starting with 3.2.1 require bug fixes present in glibc 2.2.5 and later. More information is available in the libstdc++-v3 documentation.

i?86-*-linux*#

As of GCC 3.3, binutils 2.13.1 or later is required for this platform. See PR10877 for more information.

If you receive Signal 11 errors when building on GNU/Linux, then it is possible you have a hardware problem. Further information on this can be found on www.bitwizard.nl.

i?86-*-solaris2*#

Use this for Solaris 11.3 or later on x86 and x86-64 systems. Starting with GCC 4.7, there is also a 64-bit amd64-*-solaris2* or x86_64-*-solaris2* configuration that corresponds to sparcv9-sun-solaris2*.

It is recommended that you configure GCC to use the GNU assembler. The versions included in Solaris 11.3, from GNU binutils 2.23.1 or newer (available as /usr/bin/gas and /usr/gnu/bin/as), work fine. The current version, from GNU binutils 2.34, is known to work. Recent versions of the Solaris assembler in /usr/bin/as work almost as well, though.

For linking, the Solaris linker is preferred. If you want to use the GNU linker instead, the version in Solaris 11.3, from GNU binutils 2.23.1 or newer (in /usr/gnu/bin/ld and /usr/bin/gld), works, as does the latest version, from GNU binutils 2.34.

To use GNU as, configure with the options --with-gnu-as --with-as=/usr/gnu/bin/as. It may be necessary to configure with --without-gnu-ld --with-ld=/usr/ccs/bin/ld to guarantee use of Solaris ld.

Todo

why -without-gnu-ld -with-ld?

ia64-*-linux#

IA-64 processor (also known as IPF, or Itanium Processor Family) running GNU/Linux.

If you are using the installed system libunwind library with --with-system-libunwind, then you must use libunwind 0.98 or later.

ia64-*-hpux*#

Building GCC on this target requires the GNU Assembler. The bundled HP assembler will not work. To prevent GCC from using the wrong assembler, the option --with-gnu-as may be necessary.

The GCC libunwind library has not been ported to HPUX. This means that for GCC versions 3.2.3 and earlier, --enable-libunwind-exceptions is required to build GCC. For GCC 3.3 and later, this is the default. For gcc 3.4.3 and later, --enable-libunwind-exceptions is removed and the system libunwind library will always be used.

*-ibm-aix*#

Support for AIX version 3 and older was discontinued in GCC 3.4. Support for AIX version 4.2 and older was discontinued in GCC 4.5.

‘out of memory’ bootstrap failures may indicate a problem with process resource limits (ulimit). Hard limits are configured in the /etc/security/limits system configuration file.

GCC 4.9 and above require a C++ compiler for bootstrap. IBM VAC++ / xlC cannot bootstrap GCC. xlc can bootstrap an older version of GCC and G++ can bootstrap recent releases of GCC.

GCC can bootstrap with recent versions of IBM XLC, but bootstrapping with an earlier release of GCC is recommended. Bootstrapping with XLC requires a larger data segment, which can be enabled through the LDR_CNTRL environment variable, e.g.,

% LDR_CNTRL=MAXDATA=0x50000000
% export LDR_CNTRL

One can start with a pre-compiled version of GCC to build from sources. One may delete GCC’s ‘fixed’ header files when starting with a version of GCC built for an earlier release of AIX.

To speed up the configuration phases of bootstrapping and installing GCC, one may use GNU Bash instead of AIX /bin/sh, e.g.,

% CONFIG_SHELL=/opt/freeware/bin/bash
% export CONFIG_SHELL

and then proceed as described in Building, where we strongly recommend specifying an absolute path to invoke srcdir /configure.

Because GCC on AIX is built as a 32-bit executable by default, (although it can generate 64-bit programs) the GMP and MPFR libraries required by gfortran must be 32-bit libraries. Building GMP and MPFR as static archive libraries works better than shared libraries.

Errors involving alloca when building GCC generally are due to an incorrect definition of CC in the Makefile or mixing files compiled with the native C compiler and GCC. During the stage1 phase of the build, the native AIX compiler must be invoked as cc (not xlc). Once configure has been informed of xlc, one needs to use make distclean to remove the configure cache files and ensure that CC environment variable does not provide a definition that will confuse configure. If this error occurs during stage2 or later, then the problem most likely is the version of Make (see above).

The native as and ld are recommended for bootstrapping on AIX. The GNU Assembler, GNU Linker, and GNU Binutils version 2.20 is the minimum level that supports bootstrap on AIX 5. The GNU Assembler has not been updated to support AIX 6or AIX 7. The native AIX tools do interoperate with GCC.

AIX 7.1 added partial support for DWARF debugging, but full support requires AIX 7.1 TL03 SP7 that supports additional DWARF sections and fixes a bug in the assembler. AIX 7.1 TL03 SP5 distributed a version of libm.a missing important symbols; a fix for IV77796 will be included in SP6.

AIX 5.3 TL10, AIX 6.1 TL05 and AIX 7.1 TL00 introduced an AIX assembler change that sometimes produces corrupt assembly files causing AIX linker errors. The bug breaks GCC bootstrap on AIX and can cause compilation failures with existing GCC installations. An AIX iFix for AIX 5.3 is available (APAR IZ98385 for AIX 5.3 TL10, APAR IZ98477 for AIX 5.3 TL11 and IZ98134 for AIX 5.3 TL12). AIX 5.3 TL11 SP8, AIX 5.3 TL12 SP5, AIX 6.1 TL04 SP11, AIX 6.1 TL05 SP7, AIX 6.1 TL06 SP6, AIX 6.1 TL07 and AIX 7.1 TL01 should include the fix.

Building libstdc++.a requires a fix for an AIX Assembler bug APAR IY26685 (AIX 4.3) or APAR IY25528 (AIX 5.1). It also requires a fix for another AIX Assembler bug and a co-dependent AIX Archiver fix referenced as APAR IY53606 (AIX 5.2) or as APAR IY54774 (AIX 5.1)

libstdc++ in GCC 3.4 increments the major version number of the shared object and GCC installation places the libstdc++.a shared library in a common location which will overwrite the and GCC 3.3 version of the shared library. Applications either need to be re-linked against the new shared library or the GCC 3.1 and GCC 3.3 versions of the libstdc++ shared object needs to be available to the AIX runtime loader. The GCC 3.1 libstdc++.so.4, if present, and GCC 3.3 libstdc++.so.5 shared objects can be installed for runtime dynamic loading using the following steps to set the F_LOADONLY flag in the shared object for each multilib libstdc++.a installed:

Extract the shared objects from the currently installed libstdc++.a archive:

% ar -x libstdc++.a libstdc++.so.4 libstdc++.so.5

Enable the F_LOADONLY flag so that the shared object will be available for runtime dynamic loading, but not linking:

% strip -e libstdc++.so.4 libstdc++.so.5

Archive the runtime-only shared object in the GCC 3.4 libstdc++.a archive:

% ar -q libstdc++.a libstdc++.so.4 libstdc++.so.5

Eventually, the --with-aix-soname=svr4 configure option may drop the need for this procedure for libraries that support it.

Linking executables and shared libraries may produce warnings of duplicate symbols. The assembly files generated by GCC for AIX always have included multiple symbol definitions for certain global variable and function declarations in the original program. The warnings should not prevent the linker from producing a correct library or runnable executable.

AIX 4.3 utilizes a ‘large format’ archive to support both 32-bit and 64-bit object modules. The routines provided in AIX 4.3.0 and AIX 4.3.1 to parse archive libraries did not handle the new format correctly. These routines are used by GCC and result in error messages during linking such as ‘not a COFF file’. The version of the routines shipped with AIX 4.3.1 should work for a 32-bit environment. The -g option of the archive command may be used to create archives of 32-bit objects using the original ‘small format’. A correct version of the routines is shipped with AIX 4.3.2 and above.

Some versions of the AIX binder (linker) can fail with a relocation overflow severe error when the -bbigtoc option is used to link GCC-produced object files into an executable that overflows the TOC. A fix for APAR IX75823 (OVERFLOW DURING LINK WHEN USING GCC AND -BBIGTOC) is available from IBM Customer Support and from its techsupport.services.ibm.com website as PTF U455193.

The AIX 4.3.2.1 linker (bos.rte.bind_cmds Level 4.3.2.1) will dump core with a segmentation fault when invoked by any version of GCC. A fix for APAR IX87327 is available from IBM Customer Support and from its techsupport.services.ibm.com website as PTF U461879. This fix is incorporated in AIX 4.3.3 and above.

The initial assembler shipped with AIX 4.3.0 generates incorrect object files. A fix for APAR IX74254 (64BIT DISASSEMBLED OUTPUT FROM COMPILER FAILS TO ASSEMBLE/BIND) is available from IBM Customer Support and from its techsupport.services.ibm.com website as PTF U453956. This fix is incorporated in AIX 4.3.1 and above.

AIX provides National Language Support (NLS). Compilers and assemblers use NLS to support locale-specific representations of various data formats including floating-point numbers (e.g., . vs , for separating decimal fractions). There have been problems reported where GCC does not produce the same floating-point formats that the assembler expects. If one encounters this problem, set the LANG environment variable to C or En_US.

A default can be specified with the -mcpu=cpu_type switch and using the configure option --with-cpu-cpu_type.

iq2000-*-elf#

Vitesse IQ2000 processors. These are used in embedded applications. There are no standard Unix configurations.

lm32-*-elf#

Lattice Mico32 processor. This configuration is intended for embedded systems.

lm32-*-uclinux#

Lattice Mico32 processor. This configuration is intended for embedded systems running uClinux.

LoongArch#

LoongArch processor. The following LoongArch targets are available:

loongarch64-linux-gnu*

LoongArch processor running GNU/Linux. This target triplet may be coupled with a small set of possible suffixes to identify their default ABI type:

f64

Uses lp64d/base ABI by default.

f32

Uses lp64f/base ABI by default.

sf

Uses lp64s/base ABI by default.

loongarch64-linux-gnu

Same as loongarch64-linux-gnuf64, but may be used with --with-abi=* to configure the default ABI type.

More information about LoongArch can be found at https://github.com/loongson/LoongArch-Documentation.

m32c-*-elf#

Renesas M32C processor. This configuration is intended for embedded systems.

m32r-*-elf#

Renesas M32R processor. This configuration is intended for embedded systems.

m68k-*-*#

By default, m68k-*-elf*, m68k-*-rtems, m68k-*-uclinux and m68k-*-linux build libraries for both M680x0 and ColdFire processors. If you only need the M680x0 libraries, you can omit the ColdFire ones by passing --with-arch=m68k to configure. Alternatively, you can omit the M680x0 libraries by passing --with-arch=cf to configure. These targets default to 5206 or 5475 code as appropriate for the target system when configured with --with-arch=cf and 68020 code otherwise.

The m68k-*-netbsd and m68k-*-openbsd targets also support the --with-arch option. They will generate ColdFire CFV4e code when configured with --with-arch=cf and 68020 code otherwise.

You can override the default processors listed above by configuring with --with-cpu=target. This target can either be a -mcpu argument or one of the following values: m68000, m68010, m68020, m68030, m68040, m68060, m68020-40 and m68020-60.

GCC requires at least binutils version 2.17 on these targets.

m68k-*-uclinux#

GCC 4.3 changed the uClinux configuration so that it uses the m68k-linux-gnu ABI rather than the m68k-elf ABI. It also added improved support for C++ and flat shared libraries, both of which were ABI changes.

microblaze-*-elf#

Xilinx MicroBlaze processor. This configuration is intended for embedded systems.

mips-*-*#

If on a MIPS system you get an error message saying ‘does not have gp sections for all it’s [sic] sectons [sic]’, don’t worry about it. This happens whenever you use GAS with the MIPS linker, but there is not really anything wrong, and it is okay to use the output file. You can stop such warnings by installing the GNU linker.

It would be nice to extend GAS to produce the gp tables, but they are optional, and there should not be a warning about their absence.

The libstdc++ atomic locking routines for MIPS targets requires MIPS II and later. A patch went in just after the GCC 3.3 release to make mips*-*-* use the generic implementation instead. You can also configure for mipsel-elf as a workaround. The mips*-*-linux* target continues to use the MIPS II routines. More work on this is expected in future releases.

The built-in __sync_* functions are available on MIPS II and later systems and others that support the ll, sc and sync instructions. This can be overridden by passing --with-llsc or --without-llsc when configuring GCC. Since the Linux kernel emulates these instructions if they are missing, the default for mips*-*-linux* targets is --with-llsc. The --with-llsc and --without-llsc configure options may be overridden at compile time by passing the -mllsc or -mno-llsc options to the compiler.

MIPS systems check for division by zero (unless -mno-check-zero-division is passed to the compiler) by generating either a conditional trap or a break instruction. Using trap results in smaller code, but is only supported on MIPS II and later. Also, some versions of the Linux kernel have a bug that prevents trap from generating the proper signal (SIGFPE). To enable the use of break, use the --with-divide=breaks configure option when configuring GCC. The default is to use traps on systems that support them.

moxie-*-elf#

The moxie processor.

msp430-*-elf*#

TI MSP430 processor. This configuration is intended for embedded systems.

msp430-*-elf is the standard configuration with most GCC features enabled by default.

msp430-*-elfbare is tuned for a bare-metal environment, and disables features related to shared libraries and other functionality not used for this device. This reduces code and data usage of the GCC libraries, resulting in a minimal run-time environment by default.

Features disabled by default include:

  • transactional memory

  • __cxa_atexit

nds32le-*-elf#

Andes NDS32 target in little endian mode.

nds32be-*-elf#

Andes NDS32 target in big endian mode.

nvptx-*-none#

Nvidia PTX target.

Instead of GNU binutils, you will need to install nvptx-tools. Tell GCC where to find it: --with-build-time-tools=[install-nvptx-tools]/nvptx-none/bin.

You will need newlib 3.1.0 or later. It can be automatically built together with GCC. For this, add a symbolic link to nvptx-newlib’s newlib directory to the directory containing the GCC sources.

Use the --disable-sjlj-exceptions and --enable-newlib-io-long-long options when configuring.

The --with-arch option may be specified to override the default value for the -march option, and to also build corresponding target libraries. The default is --with-arch=sm_30.

For example, if --with-arch=sm_70 is specified, -march=sm_30 and -march=sm_70 target libraries are built, and code generation defaults to -march=sm_70.

or1k-*-elf#

The OpenRISC 1000 32-bit processor with delay slots. This configuration is intended for embedded systems.

or1k-*-linux#

The OpenRISC 1000 32-bit processor with delay slots.

powerpc-*-*#

You can specify a default version for the -mcpu=cpu_type switch by using the configure option --with-cpu-cpu_type.

You will need GNU binutils 2.20 or newer.

powerpc-*-darwin*#

PowerPC running Darwin (Mac OS X kernel).

Pre-installed versions of Mac OS X may not include any developer tools, meaning that you will not be able to build GCC from source. Tool binaries are available at https://opensource.apple.com.

This version of GCC requires at least cctools-590.36. The cctools-590.36 package referenced from https://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc/2006-03/msg00507.html will not work on systems older than 10.3.9 (aka darwin7.9.0).

powerpc-*-elf#

PowerPC system in big endian mode, running System V.4.

powerpc*-*-linux-gnu*#

PowerPC system in big endian mode running Linux.

powerpc-*-netbsd*#

PowerPC system in big endian mode running NetBSD.

powerpc-*-eabisim#

Embedded PowerPC system in big endian mode for use in running under the PSIM simulator.

powerpc-*-eabi#

Embedded PowerPC system in big endian mode.

powerpcle-*-elf#

PowerPC system in little endian mode, running System V.4.

powerpcle-*-eabisim#

Embedded PowerPC system in little endian mode for use in running under the PSIM simulator.

powerpcle-*-eabi#

Embedded PowerPC system in little endian mode.

rl78-*-elf#

The Renesas RL78 processor. This configuration is intended for embedded systems.

riscv32-*-elf#

The RISC-V RV32 instruction set. This configuration is intended for embedded systems. This (and all other RISC-V) targets require the binutils 2.30 release.

riscv32-*-linux#

The RISC-V RV32 instruction set running GNU/Linux. This (and all other RISC-V) targets require the binutils 2.30 release.

riscv64-*-elf#

The RISC-V RV64 instruction set. This configuration is intended for embedded systems. This (and all other RISC-V) targets require the binutils 2.30 release.

riscv64-*-linux#

The RISC-V RV64 instruction set running GNU/Linux. This (and all other RISC-V) targets require the binutils 2.30 release.

rx-*-elf#

The Renesas RX processor.

s390-*-linux*#

S/390 system running GNU/Linux for S/390.

s390x-*-linux*#

zSeries system (64-bit) running GNU/Linux for zSeries.

s390x-ibm-tpf*#

zSeries system (64-bit) running TPF. This platform is supported as cross-compilation target only.

*-*-solaris2*#

Support for Solaris 10 has been removed in GCC 10. Support for Solaris 9 has been removed in GCC 5. Support for Solaris 8 has been removed in GCC 4.8. Support for Solaris 7 has been removed in GCC 4.6.

Solaris 11.3 provides GCC 4.5.2, 4.7.3, and 4.8.2 as /usr/gcc/4.5/bin/gcc or similar. Newer Solaris versions provide one or more of GCC 5, 7, and 9. Alternatively, you can install a pre-built GCC to bootstrap and install GCC. See the Binaries for details.

The Solaris 2 /bin/sh will often fail to configure libstdc++-v3. We therefore recommend using the following initial sequence of commands

% CONFIG_SHELL=/bin/ksh
% export CONFIG_SHELL

and proceed as described in Configuration the configure instructions. In addition we strongly recommend specifying an absolute path to invoke srcdir/configure.

In Solaris 11, you need to check for system/header, system/linker, and developer/assembler packages.

Trying to use the linker and other tools in /usr/ucb to install GCC has been observed to cause trouble. For example, the linker may hang indefinitely. The fix is to remove /usr/ucb from your PATH.

The build process works more smoothly with the legacy Solaris tools so, if you have /usr/xpg4/bin in your PATH, we recommend that you place /usr/bin before /usr/xpg4/bin for the duration of the build.

We recommend the use of the Solaris assembler or the GNU assembler, in conjunction with the Solaris linker. The GNU as versions included in Solaris 11.3, from GNU binutils 2.23.1 or newer (in /usr/bin/gas and /usr/gnu/bin/as), are known to work. The current version, from GNU binutils 2.34, is known to work as well. Note that your mileage may vary if you use a combination of the GNU tools and the Solaris tools: while the combination GNU as + Solaris ld should reasonably work, the reverse combination Solaris as + GNU ld may fail to build or cause memory corruption at runtime in some cases for C++ programs.

Todo

still?

GNU ld usually works as well. Again, the current version (2.34) is known to work, but generally lacks platform specific features, so better stay with Solaris ld. To use the LTO linker plugin (-fuse-linker-plugin) with GNU ld, GNU binutils must be configured with --enable-largefile.

To enable symbol versioning in libstdc++ with the Solaris linker, you need to have any version of GNU c++filt, which is part of GNU binutils. libstdc++ symbol versioning will be disabled if no appropriate version is found. Solaris c++filt from the Solaris Studio compilers does not work.

In order to build the GNU D compiler, GDC, a working libphobos is needed. That library wasn’t built by default in GCC 9–11 on SPARC, or on x86 when the Solaris assembler is used, but can be enabled by configuring with --enable-libphobos. Also, GDC 9.4.0 is required on x86, while GDC 9.3.0 is known to work on SPARC.

The versions of the GNU Multiple Precision Library (GMP), the MPFR library and the MPC library bundled with Solaris 11.3 and later are usually recent enough to match GCC’s requirements. There are two caveats:

  • While the version of the GMP library in Solaris 11.3 works with GCC, you need to configure with --with-gmp-include=/usr/include/gmp.

  • The version of the MPFR libary included in Solaris 11.3 is too old; you need to provide a more recent one.

sparc*-*-*#

This section contains general configuration information for all SPARC-based platforms. In addition to reading this section, please read all other sections that match your target.

Newer versions of the GNU Multiple Precision Library (GMP), the MPFR library and the MPC library are known to be miscompiled by earlier versions of GCC on these platforms. We therefore recommend the use of the exact versions of these libraries listed as minimal versions in Prerequisites the prerequisites.

sparc-sun-solaris2*#

When GCC is configured to use GNU binutils 2.14 or later, the binaries produced are smaller than the ones produced using Solaris native tools; this difference is quite significant for binaries containing debugging information.

Starting with Solaris 7, the operating system is capable of executing 64-bit SPARC V9 binaries. GCC 3.1 and later properly supports this; the -m64 option enables 64-bit code generation. However, if all you want is code tuned for the UltraSPARC CPU, you should try the -mtune=ultrasparc option instead, which produces code that, unlike full 64-bit code, can still run on non-UltraSPARC machines.

When configuring the GNU Multiple Precision Library (GMP), the MPFR library or the MPC library on a Solaris 7 or later system, the canonical target triplet must be specified as the build parameter on the configure line. This target triplet can be obtained by invoking ./config.guess in the toplevel source directory of GCC (and not that of GMP or MPFR or MPC). For example on a Solaris 11 system:

% ./configure --build=sparc-sun-solaris2.11 --prefix=xxx

sparc-*-linux*#

sparc64-*-solaris2*#

When configuring a 64-bit-default GCC on Solaris/SPARC, you must use a build compiler that generates 64-bit code, either by default or by specifying CC='gcc -m64' CXX='gcc-m64' to configure. Additionally, you must pass --build=sparc64-sun-solaris2.11 or --build=sparcv9-sun-solaris2.11 because config.guess misdetects this situation, which can cause build failures.

When configuring the GNU Multiple Precision Library (GMP), the MPFR library or the MPC library, the canonical target triplet must be specified as the build parameter on the configure line. For example on a Solaris 11 system:

% ./configure --build=sparc64-sun-solaris2.11 --prefix=xxx

sparcv9-*-solaris2*#

This is a synonym for sparc64-*-solaris2*.

c6x-*-*#

The C6X family of processors. This port requires binutils-2.22 or newer.

visium-*-elf#

CDS VISIUMcore processor. This configuration is intended for embedded systems.

*-*-vxworks*#

Support for VxWorks is in flux. At present GCC supports only the very recent VxWorks 5.5 (aka Tornado 2.2) release, and only on PowerPC. We welcome patches for other architectures supported by VxWorks 5.5. Support for VxWorks AE would also be welcome; we believe this is merely a matter of writing an appropriate ‘configlette’ (see below). We are not interested in supporting older, a.out or COFF-based, versions of VxWorks in GCC 3.

VxWorks comes with an older version of GCC installed in $WIND_BASE/host; we recommend you do not overwrite it. Choose an installation prefix entirely outside $WIND_BASE. Before running configure, create the directories prefix and prefix/bin. Link or copy the appropriate assembler, linker, etc. into prefix/bin, and set your PATH to include that directory while running both configure and make.

You must give configure the --with-headers=$WIND_BASE/target/h switch so that it can find the VxWorks system headers. Since VxWorks is a cross compilation target only, you must also specify --target=target. configure will attempt to create the directory prefix/target/sys-include and copy files into it; make sure the user running configure has sufficient privilege to do so.

GCC’s exception handling runtime requires a special ‘configlette’ module, contrib/gthr_supp_vxw_5x.c. Follow the instructions in that file to add the module to your kernel build. (Future versions of VxWorks will incorporate this module.)

x86_64-*-*, amd64-*-*#

GCC supports the x86-64 architecture implemented by the AMD64 processor (amd64-*-* is an alias for x86_64-*-*) on GNU/Linux, FreeBSD and NetBSD. On GNU/Linux the default is a bi-arch compiler which is able to generate both 64-bit x86-64 and 32-bit x86 code (via the -m32 switch).

x86_64-*-solaris2*#

GCC also supports the x86-64 architecture implemented by the AMD64 processor (amd64-*-* is an alias for x86_64-*-*) on Solaris 10 or later. Unlike other systems, without special options a bi-arch compiler is built which generates 32-bit code by default, but can generate 64-bit x86-64 code with the -m64 switch. Since GCC 4.7, there is also a configuration that defaults to 64-bit code, but can generate 32-bit code with -m32. To configure and build this way, you have to provide all support libraries like libgmp as 64-bit code, configure with --target=x86_64-pc-solaris2.11 and CC=gcc -m64.

xtensa*-*-elf#

This target is intended for embedded Xtensa systems using the newlib C library. It uses ELF but does not support shared objects. Designed-defined instructions specified via the Tensilica Instruction Extension (TIE) language are only supported through inline assembly.

The Xtensa configuration information must be specified prior to building GCC. The include/xtensa-config.h header file contains the configuration information. If you created your own Xtensa configuration with the Xtensa Processor Generator, the downloaded files include a customized copy of this header file, which you can use to replace the default header file.

xtensa*-*-linux*#

This target is for Xtensa systems running GNU/Linux. It supports ELF shared objects and the GNU C library (glibc). It also generates position-independent code (PIC) regardless of whether the -fpic or -fPIC options are used. In other respects, this target is the same as the xtensa*-*-elf target.

Microsoft Windows#

Intel 16-bit versions#

The 16-bit versions of Microsoft Windows, such as Windows 3.1, are not supported.

However, the 32-bit port has limited support for Microsoft Windows 3.11 in the Win32s environment, as a target only. See below.

Intel 32-bit versions#

The 32-bit versions of Windows, including Windows 95, Windows NT, Windows XP, and Windows Vista, are supported by several different target platforms. These targets differ in which Windows subsystem they target and which C libraries are used.

  • Cygwin *-*-cygwin: Cygwin provides a user-space Linux API emulation layer in the Win32 subsystem.

  • MinGW *-*-mingw32: MinGW is a native GCC port for the Win32 subsystem that provides a subset of POSIX.

  • MKS i386-pc-mks: NuTCracker from MKS. See https://www.mkssoftware.com for more information.

Intel 64-bit versions#

GCC contains support for x86-64 using the mingw-w64 runtime library, available from https://www.mingw-w64.org/downloads/. This library should be used with the target triple x86_64-pc-mingw32.

Windows CE#

Windows CE is supported as a target only on Hitachi SuperH (sh-wince-pe), and MIPS (mips-wince-pe).

Other Windows Platforms#

GCC no longer supports Windows NT on the Alpha or PowerPC.

GCC no longer supports the Windows POSIX subsystem. However, it does support the Interix subsystem. See above.

Old target names including *-*-winnt and *-*-windowsnt are no longer used.

PW32 (i386-pc-pw32) support was never completed, and the project seems to be inactive. See http://pw32.sourceforge.net/ for more information.

UWIN support has been removed due to a lack of maintenance.

*-*-cygwin#

Ports of GCC are included with the Cygwin environment.

GCC will build under Cygwin without modification; it does not build with Microsoft’s C++ compiler and there are no plans to make it do so.

The Cygwin native compiler can be configured to target any 32-bit x86 cpu architecture desired; the default is i686-pc-cygwin. It should be used with as up-to-date a version of binutils as possible; use either the latest official GNU binutils release in the Cygwin distribution, or version 2.20 or above if building your own.

*-*-mingw32#

GCC will build with and support only MinGW runtime 3.12 and later. Earlier versions of headers are incompatible with the new default semantics of extern inline in -std=c99 and -std=gnu99 modes.

To support emitting DWARF debugging info you need to use GNU binutils version 2.16 or above containing support for the .secrel32 assembler pseudo-op.

Older systems#

GCC contains support files for many older (1980s and early 1990s) Unix variants. For the most part, support for these systems has not been deliberately removed, but it has not been maintained for several years and may suffer from bitrot.

Starting with GCC 3.1, each release has a list of ‘obsoleted’ systems. Support for these systems is still present in that release, but configure will fail unless the --enable-obsolete option is given. Unless a maintainer steps forward, support for these systems will be removed from the next release of GCC.

Support for old systems as hosts for GCC can cause problems if the workarounds for compiler, library and operating system bugs affect the cleanliness or maintainability of the rest of GCC. In some cases, to bring GCC up on such a system, if still possible with current GCC, may require first installing an old version of GCC which did work on that system, and using it to compile a more recent GCC, to avoid bugs in the vendor compiler. Old releases of GCC 1 and GCC 2 are available in the old-releases directory on the GCC mirror sites. Header bugs may generally be avoided using fixincludes, but bugs or deficiencies in libraries and the operating system may still cause problems.

Support for older systems as targets for cross-compilation is less problematic than support for them as hosts for GCC; if an enthusiast wishes to make such a target work again (including resurrecting any of the targets that never worked with GCC 2, starting from the last version before they were removed), patches https://gcc.gnu.org/contribute.html following the usual requirements would be likely to be accepted, since they should not affect the support for more modern targets.

For some systems, old versions of GNU binutils may also be useful, and are available from pub/binutils/old-releases on sourceware.org mirror sites.

Some of the information on specific systems above relates to such older systems, but much of the information about GCC on such systems (which may no longer be applicable to current GCC) is to be found in the GCC texinfo manual.

all ELF targets (SVR4, Solaris 2, etc.)#

C++ support is significantly better on ELF targets if you use the GNU linker; duplicate copies of inlines, vtables and template instantiations will be discarded automatically.