Building Go 1.4 when the linker doesn’t know about build-id

Today at work, on a Redhat 5.5 machine, I tried to build Go 1.4.

This happened:


$ cd go1.4/src
$ ./all.bash
...snip...
# runtime/cgo
/usr/bin/ld: unrecognized option '--build-id=none'
/usr/bin/ld: use the --help option for usage information
collect2: ld returned 1 exit status


The solution is to retry without the “–build-id=none” option:

diff --git a/src/cmd/go/build.go b/src/cmd/go/build.go
index ad03239..ca45217 100644
--- a/src/cmd/go/build.go
+++ b/src/cmd/go/build.go
@@ -2436,13 +2436,21 @@ func (b *builder) cgo(p *Package, cgoExe, obj string, pcCFLAGS, pcLDFLAGS, cgofi
 	// --build-id=none.  So that is what we do, but only on
 	// systems likely to support it, which is to say, systems that
 	// normally use gold or the GNU linker.
+	retryWithoutBuildId := false
 	switch goos {
 	case "android", "dragonfly", "linux", "netbsd":
 		ldflags = append(ldflags, "-Wl,--build-id=none")
+		retryWithoutBuildId = true
 	}
 
 	if err := b.gccld(p, ofile, ldflags, gccObjs); err != nil {
-		return nil, nil, err
+		if retryWithoutBuildId {
+			ldflags = ldflags[0:len(ldflags)-1]
+			err = b.gccld(p, ofile, ldflags, gccObjs)
+		}
+		if err != nil {
+			return nil, nil, err
+		}
 	}
 
 	// NOTE(rsc): The importObj is a 5c/6c/8c object and on Windows

Just in case someone else is looking for it… 🙂

Go does not officially support RHEL before version 6, but it does seem to sort of work. This post explains why it doesn’t really work.