[PATCH 1/2] Documentation/HOWTO: Use a more recent gcc + binutils

From: Sebastian Andrzej Siewior
Date: Wed Nov 02 2016 - 13:21:32 EST


Debian Woody is pre-gcc3.2 and Sarge ships 3.3 gcc. I tried to compile
v4.8.6 on Sarge failed due to binutils:
|arch/x86/entry/entry_32.S: Assembler messages:
|arch/x86/entry/entry_32.S:379: Error: invalid character '"' in operand 1
|arch/x86/entry/entry_32.S:454: Error: too many positional arguments
|arch/x86/entry/entry_32.S:580: Error: too many positional arguments
|arch/x86/boot/bioscall.S:68: Error: `68(%esp)' is not a valid 16 bit base/index expression

among other errors. Sarge comes with GNU ld version 2.15 with is not
recent enough. I don't see those errors on Etch which ships version 2.17
and therefore I raise the limit to 2.17.
gcc is a different story. 3.3 It throws a lot of warnings
|include/linux/irq.h:402: warning: parameter has incomplete type
|include/linux/irq.h:403: warning: parameter has incomplete type
|drivers/gpu/drm/i915/i915_gem_gtt.h:312: warning: parameter has incomplete type

during the compile and fails then with
| cc1: error: unrecognized option `-Wno-override-init'

or later with

|lib/lzo/lzo1x_compress.c: In function `lzo1x_1_do_compress':
|lib/lzo/lzo1x_compress.c:132: error: implicit declaration of function `__builtin_ctz'

Etch (with gcc v4.1.2) gets to compile the kernel without plenty of
warnings and it also chokes on Wno-override-init but that one could be
easily fixed if we want to keep v4.1 as the minimum.
So I think raising the bar to gcc v4.1 isn't that bad given that the
last release of gcc 4.1 was on February 13, 2007.

Cc: Jonathan Corbet <corbet@xxxxxxx>
Cc: linux-doc@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Cc: Andrew Morton <akpm@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Signed-off-by: Sebastian Andrzej Siewior <bigeasy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
---
Documentation/Changes | 4 ++--
1 file changed, 2 insertions(+), 2 deletions(-)

diff --git a/Documentation/Changes b/Documentation/Changes
index 22797a15dc24..14e65b445707 100644
--- a/Documentation/Changes
+++ b/Documentation/Changes
@@ -29,9 +29,9 @@ you probably needn't concern yourself with isdn4k-utils.
====================== =============== ========================================
Program Minimal version Command to check the version
====================== =============== ========================================
-GNU C 3.2 gcc --version
+GNU C 4.1 gcc --version
GNU make 3.80 make --version
-binutils 2.12 ld -v
+binutils 2.17 ld -v
util-linux 2.10o fdformat --version
module-init-tools 0.9.10 depmod -V
e2fsprogs 1.41.4 e2fsck -V
--
2.10.2