How do I build binaries for old Linux versions with c++11?

Question

We have started using the cross platform build tool tundra2 to build our application binaries on different platforms. It works very well.

However, now we need to target Ubuntu 10.04. Unfortunately compiling tundra2 onto Ubuntu 10.04 is not possible without significant rework of the source code as it uses a number of c++11 features which are not available in gcc 4.4. I'm able to upgrade to a newer gcc but not one that is able to compile the code.

So I thought I'd try and build tundra2 on a newer platform and copy the tundra2 binary onto 10.04. Unfortunately I get these errors:

(lucid_amd64)matt@blaze:~/dev/OTOY2/extern/tundra2/build$ ./tundra2 
./tundra2: /lib/libc.so.6: version `GLIBC_2.14' not found (required by ./tundra2)
./tundra2: /lib/libc.so.6: version `GLIBC_2.15' not found (required by ./tundra2)

I tried static linking g++ with -static-libstdc++ and -static-libgcc options but the error persists.

Which raises the question. How do you target older platforms with newer compiler features? Should I try to compile GCC 4.8 on Ubuntu 10.04?

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After some reading and learning more about the gnu c linker than I thought I would need to know. It seems that the function that's causing the dependancy is one called __fdelt_chk introduced in 2.15. Something to do with range checking. I'm going to try to turn that off or implement a dummy for it. Also memcpy is wanting 2.14 which isn't available on Ubuntu 10.04.

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EDIT. It would seem that there are two common changes introduced in 2.14 and 2.15. In 2.14, I've read that memcpy was been updated to internally be a memmove call. In 2.15, memory bounds checks were introduced (which is what that __fdelt_chk) is about.

Appart from that, if the C++ runtime is statically linked there should be no reason a binary can't run on 10.04 and Centos 5.5.

So how do we deal with these? I've tried the memcpy wrapper but that didn't work for some reason. It still tried looking for 2.14. And putting -fno-stack-protector and -U_FORTIFY_SOURCE on the end of the compile and link lines didn't actually remove it. I'm also linking with other libraries like pthreads so I don't know if perhaps that requires it.

It would seem that searching for solutions to this problem it's actually quite common and no generic solution is shown. I think I shall try to compile gcc 4.8 on 10.04 and see how that fares.

Answer 1

compiling tundra2 onto Ubuntu 10.04 is not possible without significant rework of the source code

Install the latest and greatest release of gcc from sources.