Using openmp on windows with mingw. Cannot find -lpthread

Question

I have a CMake project which is using OpenMP and works on linux. When I went to compile it on my windows machine it looked like CMake was having trouble finding the openmp flags for mingw's gcc.

I decided to try a smaller test case and just compile main_openmp.c

#include <omp.h>
#include <stdio.h>
int main(int argc, char* argv[]) {
    int id;
    #pragma omp parallel private(id)
        {
        id = omp_get_thread_num();
        printf("%d: Hello World!\n", id);
        }
    return 0;
}

Then when I try to compile

gcc -o OpenMPTest2 main_testomp.c -fopenmp

I get

>>> gcc -o OpenMPTest2 main_testomp.c -fopenmp
c:/mingw/bin/../lib/gcc/mingw32/4.8.1/../../../../mingw32/bin/ld.exe: cannot find -lpthread
collect2.exe: error: ld returned 1 exit status

I attempted to find the solution online and tried variants of -lgomp, -lpthreadgc2, and -lpthreadvc2, with no improvement.

I searched my C:\MinGw directory recursively for any filenames containing lpthread and got this:

C:\MinGW\bin\pthreadgc2.dll
C:\MinGW\bin\pthreadgce2.dll
C:\MinGW\var\cache\mingw-get\packages\pthreads-w32-2.9.1-1-mingw32-dll.tar.lzma
C:\MinGW\var\lib\mingw-get\data\mingw32-pthreads-w32.xml

I'm not sure if I'm missing a flag, or a package, or what I'm doing wrong. For good measure here is the output of gcc -v

Using built-in specs.
COLLECT_GCC=gcc
COLLECT_LTO_WRAPPER=c:/mingw/bin/../libexec/gcc/mingw32/4.8.1/lto-wrapper.exe
Target: mingw32
Configured with: ../gcc-4.8.1/configure --prefix=/mingw --host=mingw32 --build=mingw32 --without-pic
 --enable-shared --enable-static --with-gnu-ld --enable-lto --enable-libssp --disable-multilib --ena
ble-languages=c,c++,fortran,objc,obj-c++,ada --disable-sjlj-exceptions --with-dwarf2 --disable-win32
-registry --enable-libstdcxx-debug --enable-version-specific-runtime-libs --with-gmp=/usr/src/pkg/gm
p-5.1.2-1-mingw32-src/bld --with-mpc=/usr/src/pkg/mpc-1.0.1-1-mingw32-src/bld --with-mpfr= --with-sy
stem-zlib --with-gnu-as --enable-decimal-float=yes --enable-libgomp --enable-threads --with-libiconv
-prefix=/mingw32 --with-libintl-prefix=/mingw --disable-bootstrap LDFLAGS=-s CFLAGS=-D_USE_32BIT_TIM
E_T
Thread model: win32
gcc version 4.8.1 (GCC)

Any idea what's wrong?

Answer 1

I was finally able to get things working.

First, using mingw-get I installed mingw32-pthreads-w32

This allowed me to use the -fopenmp flag with gcc.

But when using CMake I had to include the lines:

message(STATUS "Checking OpenMP")
find_package(OpenMP)
IF(OPENMP_FOUND)
    message("Found OpenMP! ^_^")
    # add flags for OpenMP
    set(CMAKE_C_FLAGS "${CMAKE_C_FLAGS} ${OpenMP_C_FLAGS}")
    set(CMAKE_CXX_FLAGS "${CMAKE_CXX_FLAGS} ${OpenMP_CXX_FLAGS}")
    set(CMAKE_SHARED_LINKER_FLAGS "${CMAKE_SHARED_LINKER_FLAGS} ${OpenMP_SHARED_LINKER_FLAGS}")
    set(CMAKE_EXE_LINKER_FLAGS "${CMAKE_EXE_LINKER_FLAGS} ${OpenMP_EXE_LINKER_FLAGS}")
ELSE()
    message("Missed OpenMP! x_x")
ENDIF()

as normal, but I also had to make sure I had the OpenMP_CXX_FLAGS in my target_link_libraries command

set(SOURCE_FILES 
    src/foo.cpp 
    src/bar.cpp
    src/baz.cpp)
add_library(<mylib> SHARED ${SOURCE_FILES})
target_link_libraries(<mylib> ${OpenMP_CXX_FLAGS})