Re: RFC: drop support for gcc < 4.0

[Ralf Baechle <ralf@linux-mips.org>]

On Tue, Aug 21, 2007 at 05:41:04PM -0300, Glauber de Oliveira Costa wrote:

> Last time I tried a mips build, it would fail the compile unless I was
> using _exactly_ 3.4.4 (I didn't tried older versions, but did try
> 3.4.6, for ex.). So I also think the 3.4 series will still have to be
> around for a while.

I don't know what broken MIPS platform you've tried.  I keep changing
between compiler versions all the time just so I can ensure builds with
older compilers keep working until we officially deciede to drop support
for them.  So the minimum compiler version for 32-bit MIPS kernels is
gcc 3.2 and for 64-bit kernel gcc 3.3.

But for sake of sanity and productivity I definately don't mind dumping
support for gcc < 4.0 or maybe even 4.1.  And while we're at it, let's
deprecate ancient binutils version as well.  A minimum version of 2.17
would be nice as I could get rid of lads of .word sillyness which is
needed to support older binutils.

  Ralf