Linux: Supporting Older GCC Releases

"A recent bug report led to a discussion about potentially dropping support for pre-4.0 versions of GCC. Adrian Bunk noted, "currently we support 6 different stable gcc release series, and it might be the right time to consider dropping support for the older ones. Are there any architectures still requiring a gcc < 4.0 ?" Russell King noted that on some architectures GCC 3.x is still preferable to the newer 4.x branch, "I want to keep support for gcc 3.4.3 for ARM for the foreseeable future. From my point of view, gcc 4 compilers have been something of a development thing as far as the ARM architecture goes. Also, gcc 3.4.3 is faster and significantly less noisy than gcc 4."

"When it was asked how many kernel developers use older version of GCC, Linus Torvalds explained that it really doesn't matter, 'it's NOT about 'kernel developers'. It's about random people testing kernels. If we make it harder for people to test kernels, we're going to lose. So no, I vote for *not* cutting off old gcc versions unless it's absolutely fatal...'"

Complete Story

Related Stories:

• Linux: The 0.02 and 0.03 Releases(Aug 03, 2007)
• Linux: Custom Kernels Trim Fat and Tune Performance(Jul 25, 2007)
• Linux: Rewriting the x86 Setup Code(Jul 17, 2007)