On Sun, Feb 11, 2018 at 10:10 PM, Arnd Bergmann <arnd@xxxxxxxx> wrote:
> On Sun, Feb 11, 2018 at 9:06 PM, Linus Torvalds
> <torvalds@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>> On Sun, Feb 11, 2018 at 11:53 AM, Linus Torvalds
>> <torvalds@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>>>
>>> Well, it's still not a very *big* bump. With modern distros being at
>>> 7.3, and people testing pre-releases of gcc-8, something like gcc-4.5
>>> is still pretty darn ancient.
>>
>> ... it's worth noting that our _documentation_ may claim that gcc-3.2
>> is the minimum supported version, but Arnd pointed out that a few
>> months ago that apparently nothing older than 4.1 has actually worked
>> for a longish while, and gcc-4.3 was needed on several architectures.
>>
>> So the _real_ jump in required gcc version would be from 4.1 (4.3 in
>> many cases) to 4.5, not from our documented "3.2 minimum".
>>
>> Arnd claimed that some architectures needed even newer-than-4.3, but I
>> assume that's limited to things like RISC-V that simply don't have old
>> gcc support at all.
>
> Right. Also architecture specific features may need something more recent,
> and in some cases like the 'initializer for anonymous union needs extra
> curly braces', a trivial change would make it work, but a lot of architectures
> have obviously never been built with toolchains old enough to actually
> run into those cases.
>
> Geert is the only person I know that actively uses gcc-4.1, and he actually
> sent some patches that seem to get additional architectures to build on
> that version, when they were previously on gcc-4.3+.
And as long as gcc-4.1 helps me finding real bugs (which it did for the
current merge window), I plan to keep on using it.
Gr{oetje,eeting}s,
Geert
--
Geert Uytterhoeven -- There's lots of Linux beyond ia32 -- geert@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
In personal conversations with technical people, I call myself a hacker. But
when I'm talking to journalists I just say "programmer" or something like that.
-- Linus Torvalds
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