build SOFA on the Centos 7.0 system？

[VCaiwei]

Hi everyone!

I want to build SOFA on the Centos 7.0 system, but I noticed such a sentence on the build page in the document: "SOFA policy is to support only the latest Ubuntu LTS."

The Centos system is our workstation, and its computing speed is faster than the ubuntu I'm currently using. So I want to know if it is feasible to build SOFA on the Centos 7.0 system? If it doesn't work, are there any suggested methods?

[fredroy]

Hello,
SOFA is regularly tested on other system than Ubuntu (I tried myself on Fedora 42 and OpenSUSE Tumbleweed) and it works well. You just have to adapt the dependencies to your package installer (usually different names between Ubuntu/debian, suse, arch, etc)

Problem is, in your case, that Centos7 is quite out-dated and its development packages are (very) old.

• gcc version is GCC 4.8 in Centos7 which barely supports c++11. SOFA needs c++17 since v20.06, and c++20 since v25.06.
• even the binaries on the website needs a recent glibc so you wont be able to execute them

So the solution for you are:

• getting a very old version (but you wont get any support, bugfixes, etc)
• or getting all the compiler/dependencies by yourself (by compiling from scratch). This would be really bothersome.

I would suggest:

• if possible, to upgrade to Rocky Linux (spiritual successor of CentOS) or Fedora42, to stay in the Red Hat ecosystem
• or create a virtual machine and install a recent system inside

[VCaiwei]

Thank you for your reply! I also encountered this issue when installing other software (its development packages are too old), but we have no choice but to use it. I will try the methods you suggested. Thank you again!

[olivier-roussel]

Hi,
You may also consider building SOFA from source but using conda forge packages for dependencies. Their linux packages are built against CentOS 7 (https://conda-forge.org/news/2023/07/12/end-of-life-for-centos-6/).
In this case, pay attention to install compilers and build tools from conda packages as well (i.e. conda install cmake cxx-compiler ninja). This will be by the way modern compilers (gcc up to v15). Conda forge have also packaged their own libc++ which will be used as well.
For SOFA, you can find the list of dependencies as conda packages in this PR here (WIP):

sofa/pixi.toml

Lines 24 to 30 in ab70568

	[dependencies]
	libboost-headers = ">=1.76.0"
	zlib = ">=1.2.11"
	eigen = ">=3.4.0"
	tinyxml2 = ">=9.0.0"
	cxxopts = ">=3.1.1"
	gtest = "*"

If you need other SOFA plugins that are not supported yet in this file, you can try to install its conda package or if not available, compile it from source, but in this case, you should install them inside your conda environment at cmake configure:
cmake -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=$CONDA_PREFIX.

[VCaiwei]

Thank you so much for your reply! This sounds very feasible. I will give it a try. If there is a result, I will reply as soon as possible.

[olivier-roussel]

If you haven't installed a conda distribution in your system yet, consider using conda-forge supported distributions (such as miniforge https://github.com/conda-forge/miniforge?tab=readme-ov-file#requirements-and-installers ) and avoid anaconda ones.

[VCaiwei]

I have successfully built SOFA. It's very useful. Thank you again for your help. :)