Is there a sort of official documentation about version compatibility between binutils, glibc and GCC? I found this matrix for binutils vs GCC version compatibility. It would be good to have something like this for GCC vs glibc as well.
The point I'm asking this for is that I need to know if I can build, say, cross GCC 4.9.2 with "embedded" glibc 2.2.4 to be able to support quite old targets like CentOS 5.
Thank you.
When building a cross-compiler there are at least two, and sometimes three, platform types to consider:
Platform A is used to BUILD a cross compiler HOSTED on Platform B which TARGETS binaries for embedded Platform C. I used the words BUILD, HOSTED, and TARGETS intentionally, as those are the options passed to configure when building a cross-GCC.
TARGET PLATFORM: Platform of machine which will
run the binaries created by the cross-GCCConsider the following (Canadian Cross Config, BUILD != HOST platform):
A 32-bit x86 Windows PC running the mingw32 toolchain will be used to compile a cross-GCC. This cross-GCC will be used on 64-bit x86 Linux computers. The binaries created by the cross-GCC should run on a 32-bit PowerPC single-board-computer running LynxOS 178 RtOS (Realtime Operating System).
In the above scenario, our platforms are as follows:
BUILD: i686-w32-mingw32
HOST: x86_64-linux-gnu
TARGET: powerpc-lynx-lynxos178
However, this is not the typical configuration. Most often BUILD PLATFORM and HOST PLATFORM are the same.
A more typical scenario (Regular Cross Config, BUILD == HOST platform):
A 64-bit x86 Linux server will be used to compile a cross-GCC. This cross-GCC will also be used on 64-bit x86 Linux computers. The binaries created by the cross-GCC should run on a 32-bit PowerPC single-board-computer running LynxOS 178 RtOS (Realtime Operating System).
In the above scenario, our platforms are as follows:
BUILD: x86_64-linux-gnu
HOST: x86_64-linux-gnu
TARGET: powerpc-lynx-lynxos178
When building the cross-GCC (assuming we are building a Regular Cross Config, where BUILD == HOST Platform), native versions of GNU BinUtils, GCC, glibc, and libstdc++ (among other libraries) will be required to actually compile the cross-GCC. It is less about specific versions of each component, and more about whether each component supports the specific language features required to compile GCC-4.9.2 (note: just because GCC-4.9.2 implements language feature X, does not mean that language feature X must be supported by the version of GCC used to compile GCC-4.9.2. In the same way, just because glibc-X.X.X implements library feature Y, does not mean that the version of GCC used to compile glibc-X.X.X must have been linked against a glibc that implements feature Y.
In your case, you should simply build your cross-GCC 4.9.2 (or if you are not cross compiling, i.e. you are compiling for CentOS 5 on Linux, build native GCC 4.9.2), and then when you link your executable for CentOS 5, explicitly link glibc v2.2.4 using -l:libc.so.2.2.4. You also probably will need to define -std=c99 or -std=gnu99 when you compile, as I highly doubt glibc 2.2.4 supports the C 2011 standard.