Binary Compatibility Issue between Linux Distributions and Versions

I was recently working with a Third-Party ISV that had run into an issue of binary compatibility with their application they built on RHEL 5 while running it on SUSE Linux Enterprise 10.  I wanted to point this out for any other developers that may run into this issue.  When they built their C and C++ applications on RHEL 5 and ran it on SLES 10, they would get a "Floating Point Exception".  This problem also exists between RHEL 4 and RHEL 5.  It turned out that there was a change in the hash style of the ELF format generated with newer versions of GCC.

To make binaries that are compatible across distributions, developers need to use the linker flag '--hash-style=sysv' when building their application.  For example;

> gcc helloworld.c -Wl,--hash-style=sysv -o helloworld

Avinesh from IBM has a good description of the issue on his blog.