How to upgrade glibc on CentOS 7

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Upgrade glibc from 2.17 to 2.31 on CentOS 7

how to upgrade glibc on centos7

⚠ WARNING: Upgrading GLIBC on CentOS 7 is a high-risk operation!

This process can potentially break your system, especially if done incorrectly.

It is highly recommended to backup your system and test the upgrade on a non-production environment first.

Proceed with caution!

⚠ EOL (End-of-Life) era notice: CentOS 7 reached EOL on 2024-06-30, and CentOS 8
(used below only to extract a newer libstdc++) reached EOL on 2021-12-31; both
centos:7 and centos:8 images are frozen archive artifacts. The devtoolset-8
SCL packages come from the EOL CentOS 7 repo ecosystem and may require switching yum
to mirror/vault.centos.org.

Version ceiling: this trick caps out at glibc 2.31. Modern software (for
example current Node.js LTS releases) requires glibc 2.34 or newer, so this is not a
general path to running recent tooling on CentOS 7. For any new workload, migrate to a
supported OS instead. The well-scoped steps below still work within their 2.31 scope.

This guide provides step-by-step instructions to upgrade the GNU C Library (glibc) and GCC on CentOS 7, along with handling potential issues.

check the current version

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gcc --version
g++ --version

locate libc.so.6
locate libstdc++.so.6
strings /usr/lib64/libc.so.6 | grep -E "^GLIBC_"
strings /usr/lib64/libstdc++.so.6 | grep -E "^GLIBCXX_"

install gcc 8

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sudo yum install -y centos-release-scl
sudo yum install -y devtoolset-8

# enable gcc 8 temporarily
scl enable devtoolset-8 bash
scl enable devtoolset-8 zsh

# enable gcc 8 permanently
echo "[ -f /opt/rh/devtoolset-8/enable ] && source /opt/rh/devtoolset-8/enable" >> ~/.bashrc
echo "[ -f /opt/rh/devtoolset-8/enable ] && source /opt/rh/devtoolset-8/enable" >> ~/.zshrc

# check the version
gcc --version
g++ --version

install glibc 2.31

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sudo yum groupinstall -y  "Development tools"
sudo yum install -y gettext-devel openssl-devel perl-CPAN perl-devel zlib-devel ncurses-devel nss-devel

GLIBC_VERSION="2.31"
# GNU="https://ftp.gnu.org/gnu"
GNU_MIRROR="https://mirrors.aliyun.com/gnu"
wget ${GNU_MIRROR}/glibc/glibc-${GLIBC_VERSION}.tar.xz
tar -xf glibc-${GLIBC_VERSION}.tar.xz && cd glibc-${GLIBC_VERSION}

mkdir build; cd build
../configure --prefix=/usr --with-headers=/usr/include --with-binutils=/usr/bin --disable-profile --enable-add-ons
../configure --prefix=/usr \
    --with-headers=/usr/include \
    --with-binutils=/usr/bin \
    --enable-add-ons \
    --enable-obsolete-nsl \
    --disable-profile \
    --disable-sanity-checks \
    --disable-werror
make -j8
sudo make install

issue: "ld: cannot find -lnss_test2"

Maybe you will encounter the following error:

/usr/bin/ld: cannot find -lnss_test2

You can fix it by the following this:

Note: the linked page (garlicspace.com) returns HTTP 404 as of 2026-08 — the link is dead.
The relevant fix is reproduced inline below.

vim ../scripts/test-installation.pl +128

Before changed:

    && $name ne "nss_test1" && $name ne "libgcc_s") {

append this condition && $name ne "nss_test2" to skip the test of nss_test2

Changed:

    && $name ne "nss_test1" && $name ne "nss_test2" && $name ne "libgcc_s") {

upgrade libstdc++, if necessary

After you have installed glibc 2.31, you also replace the old libstdc++.so.6 with the new one.

Before replacing, it looks like this:

ls -l /usr/lib64/libstdc++.so.6*

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lrwxrwxrwx. 1 root root   19 Feb 27 22:24 /usr/lib64/libstdc++.so.6 -> libstdc++.so.6.0.19
-rwxr-xr-x. 1 root root 973K Sep 29  2020 /usr/lib64/libstdc++.so.6.0.19

We will replace it with libstdc++.so.6.0.25.
But how to get it? A simple way is to use docker image to get it, like this:

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# show the libc and libstdc++ version
❯ docker container run -it --rm centos:8 bash -c "ls -l /lib64/libc.so.6*"
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 12 Mar 11  2021 /lib64/libc.so.6 -> libc-2.28.so
❯ docker container run -it --rm centos:8 bash -c "ls -l /lib64/libstdc++.so.6*"
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root      19 Oct 12  2020 /lib64/libstdc++.so.6 -> libstdc++.so.6.0.25
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 1661392 Oct 12  2020 /lib64/libstdc++.so.6.0.25

# start a container and copy libstdc++ to the host
docker container run -d --name t1 centos:8 init
docker container cp t1:/usr/lib64/libstdc++.so.6.0.25 /var/tmp

# replace the host libstdc++
sudo cp /var/tmp/libstdc++.so.6.0.25 /usr/lib64
sudo rm -fr /usr/lib64/libstdc++.so.6
cd /usr/lib64; sudo ln -s libstdc++.so.6.0.25 libstdc++.so.6

Replaced, it looks like this:

ls -l /usr/lib64/libstdc++.so.6*

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lrwxrwxrwx. 1 root root      19 Feb 27 22:24 /usr/lib64/libstdc++.so.6 -> libstdc++.so.6.0.25
-rwxr-xr-x. 1 root root  995840 Sep 29  2020 /usr/lib64/libstdc++.so.6.0.19
-rwxr-xr-x. 1 root root 1661392 Feb 27 22:24 /usr/lib64/libstdc++.so.6.0.25

Question

gnome-terminal cannot open

try this command: sudo localedef -f UTF-8 -i en_US en_US.UTF-8

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