XGBoost fails with GLIBCXX_3.4.26 not found error on Ubuntu 18.04

Question

I'm attempting to run some code that calls into XGBoost on a Ubuntu 18.04 machine. This code fails with AttributeError: 'XGBoostCostModel' object has no attribute 'pool', with the root cause:

Error message(s): ["/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libstdc++.so.6: version `GLIBCXX_3.4.26' not found (required by /root/anaconda/envs/spell/lib/libxgboost.so)"]

I know nothing about the C/C++ packaging toolchain. Running the following code fragment, suggested in some other answers to similar questions, returns the following:

$ strings /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libstdc++.so.6 | grep GLIBC
GLIBCXX_3.4
GLIBCXX_3.4.1
GLIBCXX_3.4.2
GLIBCXX_3.4.3
GLIBCXX_3.4.4
GLIBCXX_3.4.5
GLIBCXX_3.4.6
GLIBCXX_3.4.7
GLIBCXX_3.4.8
GLIBCXX_3.4.9
GLIBCXX_3.4.10
GLIBCXX_3.4.11
GLIBCXX_3.4.12
GLIBCXX_3.4.13
GLIBCXX_3.4.14
GLIBCXX_3.4.15
GLIBCXX_3.4.16
GLIBCXX_3.4.17
GLIBCXX_3.4.18
GLIBCXX_3.4.19
GLIBCXX_3.4.20
GLIBCXX_3.4.21
GLIBCXX_3.4.22
GLIBCXX_3.4.23
GLIBCXX_3.4.24
GLIBCXX_3.4.25
GLIBC_2.2.5
GLIBC_2.3
GLIBC_2.14
GLIBC_2.4
GLIBC_2.18
GLIBC_2.16
GLIBC_2.3.4
GLIBC_2.17
GLIBC_2.3.2
GLIBCXX_DEBUG_MESSAGE_LENGTH

GLIBCXX_3.4.26 does indeed seem to be missing from this list. However, I cannot figure out what apt command I need to run to get something recent enough. When I run apt-get update && apt-get install libstdc++6 (no sudo, because this is in a Docker container) I am told:

libstdc++6 is already the newest version (8.4.0-1ubuntu1~18.04).

Now what?

Answer 1

A colleague suggested downgrading to an older version of xgboost. Doing so fixed this issue (using xgboost==1.1.0).

AFAICT this means that the latest versions of xgboost are incompatible with Ubuntu 18.04 because they use a version of the compiler toolchain that is too recent for and unsupported by 18.04.