Thorsten Glaser wrote:
I’d rather know why upstream doesn’t use -ffreestanding on _all_ architectures. A kernel is _not_ a hosted environment, and GCC is right to bring in problems like this.
It's to make optimizations that use the builtin functions (e.g., memcpy) work with less fuss. If the kernel implements all the relevant library functions, then it can be considered hosted as far as GCC cares. [...]
(Nobody prevents GCC from using a memcpy builtin that uses, say, SSE instructions
Doesn't -mno-sse take care of that? However, if you (this is the general "you", not just Thorsten) find the following reasoning[1] compelling, feel free to propose a patch to Makefile instead of arch/m68k/Makefile. If others agree, some patches for the x86 string functions to get the optimizations back could follow, leaving everyone happy. Ciao, Jonathan [1] commit d6326c18 Author: Adrian Bunk <bunk@xxxxxxxxx> Date: Tue Jan 4 05:29:33 2005 -0800 [PATCH] compile with -ffreestanding For the kernel, it would be logical to use -ffreestanding. The kernel is not a hosted environment with a standard C library. The gcc option -ffreestanding is supported by both gcc 2.95 and 3.4, which covers the whole range of currently supported compilers. Regarding changes caused by this patch: Andi Kleen reported: Newer gcc rewrites sprintf(buf,"%s",str) to strcpy(buf,str) transparently. This is only true with unit-at-a-time (disabled on i386 but enabled on x86_64). The Linux kernel doesn't offer a standard C library, and such transparent replacements of kernel functions with builtins are quite fragile. Even with -ffreestanding, it's still possilble to explicitely use a gcc builtin if desired. -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-m68k" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html