On 05.05 Anton Graham wrote:
> Submitted 04-May-01 by Guillaume Cottenceau:
> > Did you know that Alan Cox recently said on LKML that Linux kernel 2.4.3
> > now needs to be compiled with gcc >= 2.96 ?
>
> So, are we soon to see kernels compiled with gcc instead of egcs?
>
> > Please also read:
>
> > http://www.bero.org/gcc296.html
>
And you should realize that this was written just after the initial release
of 2.96 by RedHat. Now, they are at revision 81, so all the initial stupid
bugs the optimizer did are gone. After that silly bugs wiped, 2.96 is
the best compiler in the gcc series. And this will also happen with 3.0,
will be even better than 2.96. And C++ makes the gap even bigger.
I am building kernels with 2.96 since short time after it appeared in
Mandrake, and had no problem. GCC was said to be broken because it miscompiled
in optimized mode some drivers.
> This is all true, but being less broken is frequently seen as more
> broken. When Opera and Netscape were, respectively, the most standards
> compliant browsers out there, they were frequently considered broken
> specifically because they didn't have the expected broken behavior
>
GCC is more strict and warns about dirty tricks used or even refuses to
compile them. This is seen as "broken", but what is really broken is the
code. And more core will be "broken" when gcc-3.0 relases, because it
is still more ISOC99 compliant (see multiline assembler strings used in
the kernel, or the use of ## in macros with empty arguments, for example
in XFS from sgi or xmps).
--
J.A. Magallon # Let the source be with you...
mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Linux Mandrake release 8.1 (Cooker) for i586
Linux werewolf 2.4.4-ac5 #1 SMP Sat May 5 01:17:07 CEST 2001 i686
