Re: [PATCH] ipv6 sit: work around bogus gcc-8 -Wrestrict warning

[Arnd Bergmann <arnd@arndb.de>]

On Thu, Feb 22, 2018 at 5:40 PM, Eric Dumazet <eric.dumazet@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Thu, 2018-02-22 at 16:55 +0100, Arnd Bergmann wrote:
>
> ...
>>
>> This code is old, so Cc stable to make sure that we don't get the warning
>> for older kernels built with new gcc.
>>
>> Cc: stable@vger.kernel.org
>
>
> This part makes little sense to me for two reasons.
>
> 1) David Miller handles stable submission himself
>  ( Documentation/networking/netdev-FAQ.txt )

Right, sorry I keep forgetting this.

> 2) We are not supposed to make sure old kernels will compile with
> future compilers.
>
> That would need a lot of work and potential new bugs, not worth the
> time.

I did spent a some time backporting the gcc-7 fixes to stable kernels
already.

The 4.4 and 4.9 releases did not build cleanly with gcc-7 originally
but now they do, which is useful since Greg actually uses that
compiler for test building them.

I expect to do the same for gcc-8. Most of the fixes are trivial
anyway, and some of them fix actual bugs that would otherwise
get missed.

      Arnd