* Emilio Pozuelo Monfort: > Your new GCC builds binaries such as libgcc1 and libstdc++6. That is > going to affect nearly all the archive at runtime, and I wonder if > it's the right approach. We introduced GCC 4.8 in wheezy, named > gcc-mozilla (a bad name I know) which didn't build these libraries, > so it didn't affect the rest of the archive, which was still > building with GCC 4.6 or 4.7 (depending on the architecture).
The GCC system libraries should be backwards compatible (and we test that extensively with each new Debian release), however I agree that this type of change is not what wheezy users expect at this point. Red Hat has published retpoline-enabled GCC versions based off GCC 4.4 and 4.8, maybe these would help? It *should* be safe to add the subset of the applicable GCC 4.8 to gcc-mozilla (that is, skip the aarch64 bits and everything else which is not part of GCC 4.8 upstream). I don't think there are any conflicts with the stack clash protection feature in Red Hat's GCC 4.8. The other problem is that rebasing the kernel compiler typically requires extensive kernel QE because some areas of the kernel really stretch what can be done in C.
