Re: RFC: drop support for gcc < 4.0

James Bottomley
2007-08-21T21:49:55Z

On Tue, 2007-08-21 at 23:21 +0200, Adrian Bunk wrote:
> On Tue, Aug 21, 2007 at 10:49:49PM +0200, Segher Boessenkool wrote:
> >> How many people e.g. test -rc kernels compiled with gcc 3.2?
> >
> > Why would that matter? It either works or not. If it doesn't
> > work, it can either be fixed, or support for that old compiler
> > version can be removed.
>
> One bug report "kernel doesn't work / crash / ... when compiled with
> gcc 3.2, but works when compiled with gcc 4.2" will most likely be lost
> in the big pile of unhandled bugs, not cause the removal of gcc 3.2
> support...

What's the bugzilla or pointer to this report please? Those of us who
use gcc-3 as the default kernel compiler will take it seriously (if it
looks to have an impact to our kernel builds) otherwise we can tell you
it's unreproducible/not a problem etc.

James

> > The only other policy than "only remove support if things are
> > badly broken" would be "only support what the GCC team supports",
> > which would be >= 4.1 now; and there are very good arguments for
> > supporting more than that with the Linux kernel.
>
> No, it's not about bugs in gcc, it's about kernel+gcc combinations that
> are mostly untested but officially supported.
>
> E.g. how many kernel developers use kernels compiled without
> unit-at-a-time? And unit-at-a-time does paper over some bugs,
> e.g. at about half a dozen section mismatch bugs I've fixed
> recently are not present with it.
>
> But as the discussions have shown gcc 4.0 is currently too high for
> making a cut, and it is not yet the right time for raising the minimum
> required gcc version.
>
> > Segher
>
> cu
> Adrian
>