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…'”

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