From the Linux kernel mailing list:
Subject: Re: Signal 11 Date: 14 Dec 2000 11:11:28 -0800 From: torvalds@transmeta.com (Linus Torvalds) To: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Quite frankly, anybody who uses RedHat 7.0 and their broken compiler for _anything_ is going to have trouble. I don't know why RH decided to do their idiotic gcc-2.96 release (it certainly wasn't approved by any technical gcc people - the gcc people were upset about it too), and I find it even more surprising that they apparently KNEW that the compiler they were using was completely broken. They included another (non-broken) compiler, and called it "kgcc". "kgcc" stands for "kernel gcc", apparently because (a) they realised that a miscompiled kernel is even worse than miscompiling some random user applications and (b) gcc-2.96 is so broken that it requires special libraries for C++ vtable chunks handling that is different, so the _working_ gcc can only be used with programs that do not need such library support. Namely the kernel. In case it wasn't obvious yet, I consider RedHat-7.0 to be basically unusable as a development platform, and I hope RH downgrades their compiler to something that works better RSN. It apparently has problems compiling stuff like the CVS snapshots of X etc too (and obviously, anything you compile under gcc-2.96 is not likely to work anywhere else except with the broken libraries).