Building Swift on CentOS - swift

Question

I am building Swift compiler from source on CentOS 6, and am running into a library issue. After fighting with the build script for a while I have got where running ./utils/build-script eventually gives:
+ /home/src/cmake-3.4.1-Linux-x86_64/bin/cmake --build /home/src/swift/build/Ninja-DebugAssert/cmark-linux-x86_64 -- all
ninja: no work to do.
llvm: using standard linker
+ cd /home/src/swift/build/Ninja-DebugAssert/llvm-linux-x86_64
+ /home/src/cmake-3.4.1-Linux-x86_64/bin/cmake -G Ninja -DCMAKE_C_COMPILER:PATH=clang -DCMAKE_CXX_COMPILER:PATH=clang++ '-DCMAKE_C_FLAGS= ' '-DCMAKE_CXX_FLAGS= ' -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE:STRING=Debug -DLLVM_ENABLE_ASSERTIONS:BOOL=TRUE -DLLVM_TOOL_SWIFT_BUILD:BOOL=NO '-DLLVM_TARGETS_TO_BUILD=X86;ARM;AArch64' -DLLVM_INCLUDE_TESTS:BOOL=TRUE -LLVM_INCLUDE_DOCS:BOOL=TRUE -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX:PATH=/usr -DINTERNAL_INSTALL_PREFIX=local /home/src/swift/llvm
CMake Error at cmake/modules/CheckAtomic.cmake:36 (message):
Host compiler appears to require libatomic, but cannot find it.
Call Stack (most recent call first):
cmake/config-ix.cmake:296 (include)
CMakeLists.txt:403 (include)
-- Configuring incomplete, errors occurred!
See also "/home/src/swift/build/Ninja-DebugAssert/llvm-linux-x86_64/CMakeFiles/CMakeOutput.log".
See also "/home/src/swift/build/Ninja-DebugAssert/llvm-linux-x86_64/CMakeFiles/CMakeError.log".
./utils/build-script: command terminated with a non-zero exit status 1, aborting
(gcc-4.8.2 was what I compiled llvm with)
libatomic is there:
$ locate libatomic
/opt/gcc-4.8.2/lib64/libatomic.a
/opt/gcc-4.8.2/lib64/libatomic.la
/opt/gcc-4.8.2/lib64/libatomic.so
/opt/gcc-4.8.2/lib64/libatomic.so.1
/opt/gcc-4.8.2/lib64/libatomic.so.1.0.0
I just don't know how to tell the build system where to look. I have tried the usual CMAKE_LIBRARY_PATH (exporting on the command line - I am not sure if cmake works like the way LD_LIBRARY_PATH, LIBRARY_PATH work) but it can't seem to find it.
I also don't have root on the machine.

Answer 1

I had not tried building from source on CentOS 6 until I saw this question, but I have been able to build Swift 2.2 on CentOS 7.1 and Ubuntu 14.04, with partial success. A few things to think about:
You will need numerous dependencies required to build Swift, and unless
they happen to be already on the system, you will need root access to
install them.
Use -R flag with the build-script to create a release build.
Building in DebugAssert (the default) will require a lot of memory. In my case even 14 GB was not sufficient. A release build
can be done with about 6 GB.
As for your specific problem, it is related to Clang's dependency on GCC-related packages for headers and libraries. See, for example, Fedora 21 with clang, without gcc.
Even if you installed GCC 4.8.2 and adjusted the path to use gcc and g++ from 4.8.2, Clang may still be looking in the old GCC directories for headers and libraries. CMake first tries to compile a C++ test file that includes the header atomic, which does not exist in the old GCC. So, it then tries to link a C test program that uses the library libatomic, which again doesn't exist in the old GCC. You can see this by looking at llvm/cmake/modules/CheckAtomic.cmake mentioned by usr1234567. CMakeError.log and CMakeOutput.log can also provide valuable insight. BTW, when I was building Swift on CentOS 7.1, I didn't run into this problem because GCC 4.8.2 was used by Clang for headers and libraries and the atomic header was found, so the C++ file got compiled. However, had the libatomic check been done, it would have failed, because libatomic.so in the repository-provided 4.8.2 has INPUT ( <name of some non-existent file> ), so trying to link with libatomic errors out.
I'm sure there are various ways of dealing with this issue, but what solved the problem for me was setting the following environment variables, please adjust to your specific setup:
export CPLUS_INCLUDE_PATH=/opt/gcc-4.8.2/include/c++/4.8.2:/opt/gcc-4.8.2/include/c++/4.8.2/x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu
export LIBRARY_PATH=/opt/gcc-4.8.2/lib64:/opt/gcc-4.8.2/lib/gcc/x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu/4.8.2
Also make sure that your 4.8.2 version of libstdc++.so is available to the dynamic linker at runtime. Since you don't have root, do
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/opt/gcc-4.8.2/lib64
If you had root, you could use ldconfig.
Before you start building Swift, you may want to try building, using Clang, a simple C program linking it with libatomic (the code doesn't actually have to use any symbols from the lib) and a simple C++ program that includes the <atomic> header. When compiling the C++ program, use the -std=c++11 compiler flag. If the C++ program compiles successfully, then it is not necessary for the libatomic linking test to be successful.
Interestingly, the CMakeOutput.log file still did not report finding GCC 4.8.2 as a candidate GCC installation, but the configuration/build worked well past the error.
Hopefully this helps. Please let us know if you run into something else.

Answer 2

CheckAtomic.cmake seems to be part of LLVM. I found a file at Github and it tries to find '__atomic_fetch_add_4' from libatomic
check_library_exists(atomic __atomic_fetch_add_4 "" HAVE_LIBATOMIC)
This fails for you. Check CMakeFiles/CMakeError.log to get more details why this test failed. Or try this line in a new project.