Re: Signal 11

Linus Torvalds
2000-12-14T19:42:29Z

In article <Pine.SUN.3.96.1001214042948.15033A-100000@eskimo.com>,
Clayton Weaver <cgweav@eskimo.com> wrote:
>
>There has a been a thread on the teTeX mailing list the last few days
>about a (RedHat, but probably more general than just their rpms)
>gcc-2.9.6 w/glibc-2.2.x bug. At -O2, it can miscompile

Quite frankly, anybody who uses RedHat 7.0 and their broken compiler for
_anything_ is going to have trouble.

I don't know why RH decided to do their idiotic gcc-2.96 release (it
certainly wasn't approved by any technical gcc people - the gcc people
were upset about it too), and I find it even more surprising that they
apparently KNEW that the compiler they were using was completely broken.
They included another (non-broken) compiler, and called it "kgcc".

"kgcc" stands for "kernel gcc", apparently because (a) they realised
that a miscompiled kernel is even worse than miscompiling some random
user applications and (b) gcc-2.96 is so broken that it requires special
libraries for C++ vtable chunks handling that is different, so the
_working_ gcc can only be used with programs that do not need such
library support. Namely the kernel.

In case it wasn't obvious yet, I consider RedHat-7.0 to be basically
unusable as a development platform, and I hope RH downgrades their
compiler to something that works better RSN. It apparently has problems
compiling stuff like the CVS snapshots of X etc too (and obviously,
anything you compile under gcc-2.96 is not likely to work anywhere else
except with the broken libraries).

Linus