5.8. Adjusting the Toolchain

Now that the temporary C libraries have been installed, all tools compiled in the rest of this chapter should be linked against these libraries. In order to accomplish this, the cross-compiler's specs file needs to be adjusted to point to the new dynamic linker in /tools.

This is done by dumping the compiler's “specs” file to a location where it will look for it by default. A simple sed substitution then alters the dynamic linker that GCC will use. The principle here is to find all references to the dynamic linker file in /lib or possibly /lib64 if the host system is 64-bit capable, and adjust them to point to the new location in /tools.

For the sake of accuracy, it is recommended to use a copy-and-paste method when issuing the following command. Be sure to visually inspect the specs file to verify that it has properly adjusted all references to the dynamic linker location. Refer to Section 5.2, “Toolchain Technical Notes,” for the default name of the dynamic linker, if necessary.

SPECS=`dirname $($LFS_TGT-gcc -print-libgcc-file-name)`/specs
$LFS_TGT-gcc -dumpspecs | sed \
  -e 's@/lib\(64\)\?/ld@/tools&@g' \
  -e "/^\*cpp:$/{n;s,$, -isystem /tools/include,}" > $SPECS 
echo "New specs file is: $SPECS"
unset SPECS

Caution

At this point, it is imperative to stop and ensure that the basic functions (compiling and linking) of the new toolchain are working as expected. To perform a sanity check, run the following commands:

echo 'main(){}' > dummy.c
$LFS_TGT-gcc -B/tools/lib dummy.c
readelf -l a.out | grep ': /tools'

If everything is working correctly, there should be no errors, and the output of the last command will be of the form:

[Requesting program interpreter: /tools/lib/ld-linux.so.2]

Note that /tools/lib, or /tools/lib64 for 64-bit machines appears as the prefix of the dynamic linker.

If the output is not shown as above or there was no output at all, then something is wrong. Investigate and retrace the steps to find out where the problem is and correct it. This issue must be resolved before continuing on. Something may have gone wrong with the specs file amendment above. In this case, redo the specs file amendment, being careful to copy-and-paste the commands.

Once all is well, clean up the test files:

rm -v dummy.c a.out

Note

Building Binutils in the next section will serve as an additional check that the toolchain has been built properly. If Binutils fails to build, it is an indication that something has gone wrong with the previous Binutils, GCC, or Glibc installations.