From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S1756977Ab0ERVjL (ORCPT ); Tue, 18 May 2010 17:39:11 -0400 Received: from terminus.zytor.com ([198.137.202.10]:47540 "EHLO mail.zytor.com" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-OK) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1754162Ab0ERVjJ (ORCPT ); Tue, 18 May 2010 17:39:09 -0400 Message-ID: <4BF308E9.4040809@zytor.com> Date: Tue, 18 May 2010 14:38:49 -0700 From: "H. Peter Anvin" User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux x86_64; en-US; rv:1.9.1.9) Gecko/20100330 Fedora/3.0.4-1.fc12 Thunderbird/3.0.4 MIME-Version: 1.0 To: Eric Dumazet CC: mingo@redhat.com, linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org, suresh.b.siddha@intel.com, tglx@linutronix.de, avi@redhat.com, linux-tip-commits@vger.kernel.org Subject: Does anyone care about gcc 3.x support for x86 anymore? References: <1273135546-29690-2-git-send-email-avi@redhat.com> <1274213443.2485.3.camel@edumazet-laptop> <4BF2FF26.9050701@zytor.com> <1274217067.2485.9.camel@edumazet-laptop> In-Reply-To: <1274217067.2485.9.camel@edumazet-laptop> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org List-ID: X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Recently, we have seen an increasing number of problems with gcc 3.4 on x86; mostly due to poor constant propagation producing not just bad code but failing to properly eliminate what should be dead code. I'm wondering if there is any remaining real use of gcc 3.4 on x86 for compiling current kernels (as opposed to residual use for compiling applications on old enterprise distros.) I'm specifically not referring to other architectures here -- most of these issues have been in relation to low-level arch-specific code, and as such only affects the x86 architectures. Other architectures may very well have a much stronger need for continued support of an older toolchain. If there isn't a reason to preserve support, I would like to consider discontinue support for using gcc 3 to compile x86 kernels. If there is a valid use case, it would be good to know what it is. -hpa