On Thu, Feb 22, 2018 at 5:40 PM, Eric Dumazet <eric.duma...@gmail.com> wrote: > On Thu, 2018-02-22 at 16:55 +0100, Arnd Bergmann wrote: > > ... >> >> This code is old, so Cc stable to make sure that we don't get the warning >> for older kernels built with new gcc. >> >> Cc: sta...@vger.kernel.org > > > This part makes little sense to me for two reasons. > > 1) David Miller handles stable submission himself > ( Documentation/networking/netdev-FAQ.txt )
Right, sorry I keep forgetting this. > 2) We are not supposed to make sure old kernels will compile with > future compilers. > > That would need a lot of work and potential new bugs, not worth the > time. I did spent a some time backporting the gcc-7 fixes to stable kernels already. The 4.4 and 4.9 releases did not build cleanly with gcc-7 originally but now they do, which is useful since Greg actually uses that compiler for test building them. I expect to do the same for gcc-8. Most of the fixes are trivial anyway, and some of them fix actual bugs that would otherwise get missed. Arnd