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. That was from a discussion about bug report that only happened with gcc-4.4, and was because gcc-4.4 did insane things, so we were talking about how it wasn't necessarily worth supporting. So we really have had a lot of unrelated reasons why just saying "gcc-4.5 or newer" would be a good thing. Linus -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-s390" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html