“Adrian Bunk posted a patch to the lkml to remove support for
older versions of the Gnu Compiler Collection. With his patch,
versions of gcc prior to 3.2 would no longer be able to compile the
kernel. He offers two advantages, ‘reducing the number of supported
gcc versions from 8 to 4 allows the removal of several #ifdef’s and
workarounds,’ and ‘my impression is that the older compilers are
only rarely used, so miscompilations of a driver with an old gcc
might not be detected for a longer amount of time.’ He further
explains, ‘my personal opinion about the time and space a
compilation requires is that this is no longer that much of a
problem for modern hardware, and in the worst case you can compile
the kernels for older machines on more recent machines…'”
Web Webster has more than 20 years of writing and editorial experience in the tech sector. He’s written and edited news, demand generation, user-focused, and thought leadership content for business software solutions, consumer tech, and Linux Today, he edits and writes for a portfolio of tech industry news and analysis websites including webopedia.com, and DatabaseJournal.com.
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