CUDA incompatible with my gcc version

Question

I have troubles compiling some of the examples shipped with CUDA SDK. I have installed the developers driver (version 270.41.19) and the CUDA toolkit, then finally the SDK (both the 4.0.17 version).

Initially it didn't compile at all giving:

error -- unsupported GNU version! gcc 4.5 and up are not supported!

I found the line responsible in 81:/usr/local/cuda/include/host_config.h and changed it to:

//#if __GNUC__ > 4 || (__GNUC__ == 4 && __GNUC_MINOR__ > 4)
#if __GNUC__ > 4 || (__GNUC__ == 4 && __GNUC_MINOR__ > 6)

from that point on I got only a few of the examples to compile, it stops with:

In file included from /usr/include/c++/4.6/x86_64-linux-gnu/bits/gthr.h:162:0,
             from /usr/include/c++/4.6/ext/atomicity.h:34,
             from /usr/include/c++/4.6/bits/ios_base.h:41,
             from /usr/include/c++/4.6/ios:43,
             from /usr/include/c++/4.6/ostream:40,
             from /usr/include/c++/4.6/iterator:64,
             from /usr/local/cuda/include/thrust/iterator/iterator_categories.h:38,
             from /usr/local/cuda/include/thrust/device_ptr.h:26,
             from /usr/local/cuda/include/thrust/device_malloc_allocator.h:27,
             from /usr/local/cuda/include/thrust/device_vector.h:26,
             from lineOfSight.cu:37:
/usr/include/c++/4.6/x86_64-linux-gnu/bits/gthr-default.h:251:1: error: pasting         "__gthrw_" and "/* Android's C library does not provide pthread_cancel, check for
`pthread_create' instead.  */" does not give a valid preprocessing token
make[1]: *** [obj/x86_64/release/lineOfSight.cu.o] Error 1

As some of the examples compile I reckon this is not a driver problem, but rather must have something to do with an unsupported gcc version. Downgrading is not an option as gcc4.6 has a whole system as a dependency at this point...

Answer 1

As already pointed out, nvcc depends on gcc 4.4. It is possible to configure nvcc to use the correct version of gcc without passing any compiler parameters by adding softlinks to the bin directory created with the nvcc install.

The default cuda binary directory (the installation default) is /usr/local/cuda/bin, adding a softlink to the correct version of gcc from this directory is sufficient:

sudo ln -s /usr/bin/gcc-4.4 /usr/local/cuda/bin/gcc