[PATCH 01/14] kbuild: Bump minimum version of LLVM for building the kernel to 17.0.1

Nathan Chancellor
2026-04-29T03:00:12Z

The current minimum version of LLVM for building the kernel is 15.0.0.
However, there are two deficiencies compared to GCC that were fixed in
LLVM 17 that are starting to become more noticeable.

The first was a bug in LLVM's scope checker [1], where all labels in a
function were validated as potential targets of an asm goto statement,
even if they were not listed in the asm goto statement as targets. This
becomes particularly problematic when the cleanup attribute is used, as

asm goto(... : label_a);
...
label_a:
...
int var __free(foo);
asm goto(... : label_b);
...
label_b:
...

will trigger an error since the scope checker will complain that the
cleanup variable would be skipped when jumping from the first asm goto
to label_b (which obviously cannot happen). This issue was the catalyst
for commit e2ffa15b9baa ("kbuild: Disable CC_HAS_ASM_GOTO_OUTPUT on
clang < 17"). Unfortunately, this issue is reproducible with regular asm
goto in addition to asm goto with outputs, so that change was not
entirely sufficient to avoid the issue altogether. As asm goto has
effectively been required since commit a0a12c3ed057 ("asm goto:
eradicate CC_HAS_ASM_GOTO") and the usage of the cleanup attribute
continues to grow across the tree, raising the minimum to a version that
avoids this issue altogether is a better long term solution than
attempting to workaround it at every spot where it happens.

The second issue is an incompatibility with GCC 8.1+ around variables
marked with const being valid constant expressions for _Static_assert
and other macros [2]. With GCC 8.1 being the minimum supported version
since commit 118c40b7b503 ("kbuild: require gcc-8 and binutils-2.30"),
this incompatibility becomes more of a maintenance burden since only
clang-15 and clang-16 are affected by it.

Looking at the clang version of various major distributions through
Docker images, no one should be left behind as a result of this bump, as
the old ones cannot clear the current minimum of 15.0.0.

archlinux:latest clang version 22.1.3
debian:oldoldstable-slim Debian clang version 11.0.1-2
debian:oldstable-slim Debian clang version 14.0.6
debian:stable-slim Debian clang version 19.1.7 (3+b1)
debian:testing-slim Debian clang version 21.1.8 (3+b1)
debian:unstable-slim Debian clang version 21.1.8 (7+b1)
fedora:42 clang version 20.1.8 (Fedora 20.1.8-4.fc42)
fedora:latest clang version 21.1.8 (Fedora 21.1.8-4.fc43)
fedora:44 clang version 22.1.1 (Fedora 22.1.1-2.fc44)
fedora:rawhide clang version 22.1.3 (Fedora 22.1.3-1.fc45)
opensuse/leap:latest clang version 17.0.6
opensuse/tumbleweed:latest clang version 21.1.8
ubuntu:jammy Ubuntu clang version 14.0.0-1ubuntu1.1
ubuntu:noble Ubuntu clang version 18.1.3 (1ubuntu1)
ubuntu:questing Ubuntu clang version 20.1.8 (0ubuntu4)
ubuntu:resolute Ubuntu clang version 21.1.8 (6ubuntu1)

17.0.1 is chosen as the minimum instead of 17.0.0 to ensure that the
particular version of LLVM 17 has the two aforementioned bugs fixed, as
the second was fixed during the 17.0.0 release candidate phase and it
was not until LLVM 18 that LLVM adopted the scheme of x.0.0 being a
prerelease version and x.1.0 is a release version [3] to help with
scenarios such as this.

Link: https://github.com/llvm/llvm-project/commit/f023f5cdb2e6c19026f04a15b5a935c041835d14 [1]
Link: https://github.com/llvm/llvm-project/commit/0b2d5b967d98375793897295d651f58f6fbd3034 [2]
Link: https://github.com/llvm/llvm-project/commit/4532617ae420056bf32f6403dde07fb99d276a49 [3]
Signed-off-by: Nathan Chancellor <nathan@kernel.org>
---
Cc: Jonathan Corbet <corbet@lwn.net>
Cc: Shuah Khan <skhan@linuxfoundation.org>
Cc: linux-doc@vger.kernel.org
---
Documentation/process/changes.rst | 2 +-
scripts/min-tool-version.sh | 2 +-
2 files changed, 2 insertions(+), 2 deletions(-)

diff --git a/Documentation/process/changes.rst b/Documentation/process/changes.rst
index 9a99037270ff..b9afce768446 100644
--- a/Documentation/process/changes.rst
+++ b/Documentation/process/changes.rst
@@ -36,7 +36,7 @@ bindgen (optional) 0.71.1 bindgen --version
binutils 2.30 ld -v
bison 2.0 bison --version
btrfs-progs 0.18 btrfs --version
-Clang/LLVM (optional) 15.0.0 clang --version
+Clang/LLVM (optional) 17.0.1 clang --version
e2fsprogs 1.41.4 e2fsck -V
flex 2.5.35 flex --version
gdb 7.2 gdb --version
diff --git a/scripts/min-tool-version.sh b/scripts/min-tool-version.sh
index b96ec2d379b6..ea2689bc9641 100755
--- a/scripts/min-tool-version.sh
+++ b/scripts/min-tool-version.sh
@@ -27,7 +27,7 @@ llvm)
if [ "$SRCARCH" = loongarch ]; then
echo 18.0.0
else
- echo 15.0.0
+ echo 17.0.1
fi
;;
rustc)

--
2.54.0