We won't be needing a C++ compiler until the next chapter. So, only the gcc-core tarball needs to be unpacked at this time. This package is known to behave badly when you have changed its default optimization flags (including the -march and -mcpu options). Therefore, if you have defined any environment variables that override default optimizations, such as CFLAGS and CXXFLAGS, we recommend unsetting or modifying them when building GCC. patch -Np1 -i ../gcc-&gcc-version;-mmap_test.patch patch -Np1 -i ../gcc-&gcc-version;-no_fixincludes.patch It is recommended by the GCC installation documentation to build GCC outside of the source directory in a dedicated directory: mkdir ../gcc-build cd ../gcc-build Prepare GCC to be compiled: ../gcc-&gcc-version;/configure --prefix=/stage1 \     --with-local-prefix=/stage1 \     --disable-nls --enable-shared \     --enable-languages=c The meaning of the new configure options is: --with-local-prefix=/stage1: The purpose of this switch is to remove /usr/local/include from gcc's include search path. This is not absolutely essential, but we want to try and minimize the influence from the host system, so this seems a logical thing to do. --enable-shared: This switch may seem counter-intuitive at first. But using it allows the building of libgcc_s.so.1 and libgcc_eh.a, and having libgcc_eh.a available ensures that the configure script for Glibc (the next package we compile) produces the proper results. Please note that the gcc binaries will still be linked statically, as this is controlled by the -static value of BOOT_LDFLAGS further on. --enable-languages=c: This will build only the C compiler from the GCC package. We won't be needing anything else during this chapter. Continue with compiling the package: make BOOT_LDFLAGS="-static" bootstrap The meaning of the make parameters is: BOOT_LDFLAGS="-static": This tells GCC to link its programs statically. bootstrap: This target doesn't just compile GCC, but compiles it several times. It uses the programs compiled in a first round to compile itself a second time, and then again a third time. It then compares these second and third compiles to make sure it can reproduce itself flawlessly, which most probably means that it was compiled correctly. And install the package: make install As a finishing touch we'll create the /stage1/bin/cc symlink. Many programs and scripts run cc instead of gcc, a thing meant to keep programs generic and therefore usable on all kinds of Unix systems. Not everybody has the GNU C compiler installed. Simply running cc leaves the system administrator free to decide what C compiler to install, as long as there's a symlink pointing to it: ln -sf gcc /stage1/bin/cc