[YBA] kernel compile errors with GCC >= 4.6

[Jonathan Ben Avraham]

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 <nyh at math.technion.ac.il>
> To: Jonathan Ben Avraham <yba at tkos.co.il>
> Cc: ILUG <linux-il at 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.
>
>

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