On Sun, 28 Jun 2020 at 20:57, Linus Torvalds <torvalds@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > On Sun, Jun 28, 2020 at 11:26 AM Ingo Molnar <mingo@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > > > - Fix build regression on v4.8 and older > > Interesting. > > It's perhaps yet another reason to just skip gcc-4.8 too, since > apparently 4.9 works. > +1 > gcc-4.9 really has a lot of advantages. It's where (I think) gcc > basically supports all C11 things, including _Generic() but also > __auto_type. > > So if we just say that we only care about gcc-4.9 upwards, it frees us > to clean up some (really) old constructions where we've been using > macros with sizeof and/or typeof, and make the code potentially rather > more readable and often more compact. > > Yeah, I know we _just_ made the minimum compiler version be 4.8, but I > do get the feeling that we should just have bitten the bullet and gone > all the way to 4.9. > > Arnd, what was the reason for 4.8 support? I'm assuming there's some > sad unfortunate distro that still uses that ancient compiler.. > Arnd may know more, but I know one of the reasons 4.8 is significant is because RHEL 7 uses it, which will go EOL in 2024. > Ok, ok, 4.9 isn't exactly new either (4.9.0 released May 2014, and > final 4.9 release was 2016), but 4.9 really from a feature angle is a > much saner thing than 4.8. > > Afaik, the main "interesting" part of gcc-4.8 was that it was when gcc > switched over to be built as C++. That's perhaps a huge milestone for > gcc itself, but not necessarily for the users.. > > Arnd? You're the one who tends to keep track of these things.. > > Linus
