Linking with gfortran: _edata: invalid version 21 (max 4)

Question

I'm working with RHEL6 systems, but need to port the code using C++11 (and even C++14) features. This forced me to build gcc-8.2 by hand, installed under a private prefix (/prod/pfe/local). This created a number of executables under /prod/pfe/local/bin: gcc, g++, ld, and gfortran.

I'm now trying to build CBLAS, which uses the above gfortran. Building the library (cblas_LINUX.a) works fine, but creating an executable fails with a cryptic errors cited in the title:

gfortran -o xscblat1 c_sblat1.o c_sblas1.o ../lib/cblas_LINUX.a
/prod/pfe/local/lib/gcc/x86_64-pc-linux-gnu/8/../../../../x86_64-pc-linux-gnu/bin/ld: /prod/pfe/local/lib/gcc/x86_64-pc-linux-gnu/8/../../../../lib64/libgfortran.so: _edata: invalid version 21 (max 4) /prod/pfe/local/lib/gcc/x86_64-pc-linux-gnu/8/../../../../x86_64-pc-linux-gnu/bin/ld: /prod/pfe/local/lib/gcc/x86_64-pc-linux-gnu/8/../../../../lib64/libgfortran.so: error adding symbols: bad value

Did I configure build gfortran incorrectly? If not, how do I solve this problem -- additional FFLAGS or LDFLAGS of some kind?

Answer 1

Ok, according to the gcc-developers, this is a known bug triggered by the use of the new linker (gold).

Rebuilding the compiler suit with --disable-gold solves the problem.

Update: correction -- somehow, disabling gold is not good enough. Going back to the binutils-2.30 is what I ended up doing...