GCC 4.2 is stricter in literal strings to char pointers conversion: now one can only convert literal strings to 'const char *', conversion to 'char *' is prohibited. This affects the build of the JDK when GCC 4.2 or higher is used on linux: src/os/linux/vm/jvm_linux.cpp and src/os/linux/vm/os_linux.cpp contain such unsafe conversions, which causes the build to fail.
Also, I found another problem which might lead to compliation failure. See comments for details.