6.3.4 Makefile Targets

These targets are available from the ‘gcc’ directory:

all

This is the default target. Depending on what your build/host/target configuration is, it coordinates all the things that need to be built.

doc

Produce info-formatted documentation and man pages. Essentially it calls ‘make man’ and ‘make info’.

dvi

Produce DVI-formatted documentation.

pdf

Produce PDF-formatted documentation.

html

Produce HTML-formatted documentation.

man

Generate man pages.

info

Generate info-formatted pages.

mostlyclean

Delete the files made while building the compiler.

clean

That, and all the other files built by ‘make all’.

distclean

That, and all the files created by configure.

maintainer-clean

Distclean plus any file that can be generated from other files. Note that additional tools may be required beyond what is normally needed to build GCC.

srcextra

Generates files in the source directory that are not version-controlled but should go into a release tarball.

srcinfo

srcman

Copies the info-formatted and manpage documentation into the source directory usually for the purpose of generating a release tarball.

install

Installs GCC.

uninstall

Deletes installed files, though this is not supported.

check

Run the testsuite. This creates a testsuite subdirectory that has various .sum and .log files containing the results of the testing. You can run subsets with, for example, ‘make check-gcc’. You can specify specific tests by setting RUNTESTFLAGS to be the name of the .exp file, optionally followed by (for some tests) an equals and a file wildcard, like:

make check-gcc RUNTESTFLAGS="execute.exp=19980413-*"

Note that running the testsuite may require additional tools be installed, such as Tcl or DejaGnu.

The toplevel tree from which you start GCC compilation is not the GCC directory, but rather a complex Makefile that coordinates the various steps of the build, including bootstrapping the compiler and using the new compiler to build target libraries.

When GCC is configured for a native configuration, the default action for make is to do a full three-stage bootstrap. This means that GCC is built three times—once with the native compiler, once with the native-built compiler it just built, and once with the compiler it built the second time. In theory, the last two should produce the same results, which ‘make compare’ can check. Each stage is configured separately and compiled into a separate directory, to minimize problems due to ABI incompatibilities between the native compiler and GCC.

If you do a change, rebuilding will also start from the first stage and “bubble” up the change through the three stages. Each stage is taken from its build directory (if it had been built previously), rebuilt, and copied to its subdirectory. This will allow you to, for example, continue a bootstrap after fixing a bug which causes the stage2 build to crash. It does not provide as good coverage of the compiler as bootstrapping from scratch, but it ensures that the new code is syntactically correct (e.g., that you did not use GCC extensions by mistake), and avoids spurious bootstrap comparison failures¹.

Other targets available from the top level include:

bootstrap-lean

Like bootstrap, except that the various stages are removed once they’re no longer needed. This saves disk space.

bootstrap2

bootstrap2-lean

Performs only the first two stages of bootstrap. Unlike a three-stage bootstrap, this does not perform a comparison to test that the compiler is running properly. Note that the disk space required by a “lean” bootstrap is approximately independent of the number of stages.

stageN-bubble (N = 1…4, profile, feedback)

Rebuild all the stages up to N, with the appropriate flags, “bubbling” the changes as described above.

all-stageN (N = 1…4, profile, feedback)

Assuming that stage N has already been built, rebuild it with the appropriate flags. This is rarely needed.

cleanstrap

Remove everything (‘make clean’) and rebuilds (‘make bootstrap’).

compare

Compares the results of stages 2 and 3. This ensures that the compiler is running properly, since it should produce the same object files regardless of how it itself was compiled.

profiledbootstrap

Builds a compiler with profiling feedback information. In this case, the second and third stages are named ‘profile’ and ‘feedback’, respectively. For more information, see Building with profile feedback in Installing GCC.

restrap

Restart a bootstrap, so that everything that was not built with the system compiler is rebuilt.

stageN-start (N = 1…4, profile, feedback)

For each package that is bootstrapped, rename directories so that, for example, gcc points to the stageN GCC, compiled with the stageN-1 GCC².

You will invoke this target if you need to test or debug the stageN GCC. If you only need to execute GCC (but you need not run ‘make’ either to rebuild it or to run test suites), you should be able to work directly in the stageN-gcc directory. This makes it easier to debug multiple stages in parallel.

stage

For each package that is bootstrapped, relocate its build directory to indicate its stage. For example, if the gcc directory points to the stage2 GCC, after invoking this target it will be renamed to stage2-gcc.

If you wish to use non-default GCC flags when compiling the stage2 and stage3 compilers, set BOOT_CFLAGS on the command line when doing ‘make’.

Usually, the first stage only builds the languages that the compiler is written in: typically, C and maybe Ada. If you are debugging a miscompilation of a different stage2 front-end (for example, of the Fortran front-end), you may want to have front-ends for other languages in the first stage as well. To do so, set STAGE1_LANGUAGES on the command line when doing ‘make’.

For example, in the aforementioned scenario of debugging a Fortran front-end miscompilation caused by the stage1 compiler, you may need a command like

make stage2-bubble STAGE1_LANGUAGES=c,fortran

Alternatively, you can use per-language targets to build and test languages that are not enabled by default in stage1. For example, make f951 will build a Fortran compiler even in the stage1 build directory.