On Wed, Mar 03, 2021 at 11:25:34AM -0800, Linus Torvalds wrote: > On Wed, Mar 3, 2021 at 11:15 AM Josh Poimboeuf <jpoimboe@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > > > Adding Linus, who indicated in another thread that we shouldn't force > > exact GCC versions because there's no technical reason to do so. > > I do not believe we should recompile everything just because the gcc > version changes. > > But gcc _plugins_ certainly should depend on the kernel version. > > Very few people should be enabling the gcc plugins in the first place. > Honestly, most of them are bad, and the people who really care about > those things have already moved to clang which does the important > parts natively without the need for a plugin. I'm personally waiting > for the day when we can just say "let's remove them". You might be sad to learn that some of the plugins are useful for hardening of a production distro kernel, like stackleak and structleak. > But in the meantime, making the plugins depend on the gcc version some > way is certainly better than not doing so. So currently, the plugins already so that. They require the GCC version to be exact. If there's a mismatch, then it fails the OOT module build. But that's not usable for a distro. When users build OOT modules with a slight GCC mismatch, it breaks the build, effectively requiring the exact same GCC version for *all* OOT builds going forward. So there have been a few proposals to better handle GCC version mismatches: 1) disable the plugin - this works fine for most plugins except randstruct 2) rebuild the plugin whenever the GCC version changes 3) fail the build, like today - effectively blocks distros from using plugins -- Josh
