Hi Nadav,
From a technical viewpoint of view, forward compatibility is not feasible
in software. 3.4 might compile fine now under GCC 3.2, but it is likely to
break in some future version of GCC that, for example, warns on "goto", or
more realistically, warns on the string "-" that might be a dash, hyphen,
or minus depending on the interpretation of your editor.
I think that it would be best if kernels were released with the list of
compiler types and versions under which they were tested before release.
It is not useful to pretend that there is no necessary connection between
particular GCC versions and particular kernel versions. The compiler is in
fact a part of the running kernel.
- yba
On Thu, 5 Apr 2012, Nadav Har'El wrote:
Date: Thu, 5 Apr 2012 11:45:15 +0300
From: Nadav Har'El <n...@math.technion.ac.il>
To: Jonathan Ben Avraham <y...@tkos.co.il>
Cc: ILUG <linux-il@cs.huji.ac.il>
Subject: Re: [YBA] kernel compile errors with GCC >= 4.6
On Wed, Apr 04, 2012, Jonathan Ben Avraham wrote about "[YBA] kernel compile errors
with GCC >= 4.6":
My question is in general, is there somewhere where the relationship
between kernel version and gcc version (or other compiler version)
is made explicit?
According to the Linux README, Linux depends on gcc, at least version
3.2. It doesn't say you must use some specific version - which means
that Linux's "make" *should* finish without aborting on any newer
version - including versions which added new warning messages. If it
doesn't, it's a bug.
I'd hate for Linux to declare that it only works with a specific version
of the compiler. I routinely compile the latest kernel with a 3 year old
compiler (gcc 4.4), and don't have any problems. Other people may be
compiling a 3 year old kernel with the latest snapshot of gcc, and they
shouldn't have problems either.
--
EE 77 7F 30 4A 64 2E C5 83 5F E7 49 A6 82 29 BA ~. .~ Tk Open Systems
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- y...@tkos.co.il - tel: +972.2.679.5364, http://www.tkos.co.il -
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