Zack's Kernel News
Zack's Kernel News
Chronicler Zack Brown reports on the latest news, views, dilemmas, and developments within the Linux kernel community.
Identifying the Oldest Compatible GCC Versions
Arnd Bergmann decided to test all versions of GCC to see how far back he could go and still compile a proper Linux kernel. He reported:
gcc-4.9 and higher is basically warning-free everywhere, although gcc-7 introduces some interesting new warnings (I have started doing patches for those as well). gcc-4.8 is probably good, too, and gcc-4.6 and 4.7 at least don't produce build failures in general, though the level of false-positive warnings increases (we could decide to turn those off for older compilers for build test purposes).
In gcc-4.5 and below, dead code elimination is not as good as later, causing a couple of link errors, and some of them have no good workaround.
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