-aa 3.5GB Patch Questions

[Mitch Sako <msako@cadence.com>]

I've been using Andrea's 2.4.18rc4aa1 patches applied to a generic
2.4.18 kernel running on Intel 32-bit machines with 4GB of memory and
usually some sort of Serversorks chipset with 1-2 CPUs of various speeds
with great success for almost 6 months now.  The primary base has been a
SuSE 7.2 distro but others are now being tried, including Slackware 8.1
and RH 7.[23].  The principal reason for this was to use the
00_3.5G-address-space-4 feature.  I apply all patches in the directory
and have not seen a kernel failure yet with thousands of hours of "big
process" CPU time logged across many machines.  I consider this to be a
pretty stable combination of kernel and patches for what I need.

RH's 2.96 gcc compiles fine but blows up or slows to a crawl (not
unexpected) when big jobs are run and the machine starts paging.  I've
fixed this by putting a 2.95.3 gcc on the machine.  I'll leave the
editorial comments about 2.96-RH to others.

I'm trying to write some sanitized procedures which will allow me to
pass this on to others.  Non-2.96 distros (everyone except RH and
Mandrake, AFAIK) have run fine without issues, mainly because they have
a pretty stable 2.95 compiler included.

I will assume that a gcc 2.95 retrofit is required to make the -aa
patches work on RH 7.[23].

What's the correct way to retrofit a 2.95.3 compiler onto an RH 7.[23]
distro?
Is it OK to just load it into /usr/local and build it?
Does it require 'make bootstrap' to be entirely santized?
Are there other GNU packages that I should be including with the gcc
retrofit?

-ms