While I would certainly like to see a move of LFS (and HLFS) toward GCC4 and would welcome the appropriate patches to make this happen, I would urge a little caution in adopting GCC 4 (before GCC 4.1 is released) as part of the mainstream for at least a couple of reasons.
First, "hardened" is typically inconsistent with bleeding edge insofar as technology is concerned. I have identified at least a couple of problems with GCC 4.0 (some of which have been fixed in the CVS) in compiling the kernel and other code which cause me to be concerned that it is not, yet, ready for production use insofar as hardened systems are concerned. Second, the operating system is rarely the end point. Many existing applications do not compile, correctly, with GCC 4 and while I expect that to change as GCC 4 matures, if you are actually looking to run something on a GCC 4 compiled system it would be good to know that it actually compiles. I know a couple of distros (like Debian) are shipping with GCC 4 and I've seen various reports of compile issues with MySQL and other apps to scare me just a little. Also, certain kernel drivers (including some core kernel drivers) did not compile with GCC 4 (again, some have been fixed in CVS). Third, as Linus Torvalds has pointed out, (http://kerneltrap.org/node/4126 ), the early releases of new GCC versions tend to be, in his words, "slower, generate worse code, buggier". I am not suggesting that GCC 4.X will not, eventually, be a far better compiler than the GCC 3 series, but I'm not sure. I've built a production HLFS system running Oracle 10g using GCC 4.0 for everything BUT the kernel. But I am reluctant to see GCC 4.0 adopted for HLFS until sufficient regression testing has been performed to know that common variations of Linux 2.6.x and related apps/utilities compiled cleanly with a 4.x compiler. Sean -- http://linuxfromscratch.org/mailman/listinfo/hlfs-dev FAQ: http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/faq/ Unsubscribe: See the above information page
