I am trying to create a development environment on my host machine that is identical (or as close to as possible) to the one on my embedded device using a chroot. Both host and target machines are x86 so I am not attempting to cross compile. I want to build GCC in my chroot and then using build libc and any other libs that are already on my embedded device (as well as any others that my executable will need to run in order to deploy on the device). In this way I am hoping to have all of the libs on my dev machine correctly linked with the appropriate version of libc.
My question is this – I know that the libc on the embedded device is 4.3.2 but how important is it that I use the same version of GCC to build the libraries locally on my dev machine?? Are there any potential complications if I actually use a more recent version (i.e. the one that came with my dev machine install which is 4.6.3) to build these libs??
As long as the ABI has not changed between compiler versions, you should be fine. From the back of my head, the C ABI hasn’t changed in ages, and the C++ ABI not since 3.4 / 4.0. Check the official docs to be sure.