Re: [RFC] minimum gcc version for kernel: raise to gcc-4.3 or 4.6?

Heiko Carstens
2016-12-20T09:59:20Z

On Fri, Dec 16, 2016 at 11:00:27PM +0100, Arnd Bergmann wrote:
> On Friday, December 16, 2016 6:00:43 PM CET Sebastian Andrzej Siewior wrote:
> > On 2016-12-16 11:56:21 [+0100], Arnd Bergmann wrote:
> > > The original gcc-4.3 release was in early 2008. If we decide to still
> > > support that, we probably want the first 10 quirks in this series,
> > > while gcc-4.6 (released in 2011) requires none of them.
> >
> > It this min gcc thingy ARM only?
>
> This is part of the question that I'm trying to figure out myself.
>
> Clearly having the same minimum version across all architectures simplifies
> things a lot, because many of the bugs in old versions are architecture
> independent. Then again, some architectures implicitly require a new version
> because an old one never existed (e.g. arm64 or risc-v), while some other
> architectures may require an old version.

FWIW, s390 requires gcc 4.3 or newer since two years already. For older
compilers we enforce a compile error (see arch/s390/kernel/asm-offsets.c).