Re: [RFC PATCH] Remove Intel compiler support

From: Nick Desaulniers
Date: Tue Oct 11 2022 - 12:43:57 EST


On Tue, Oct 11, 2022 at 8:18 AM Arnd Bergmann <arnd@xxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> On Tue, Oct 11, 2022, at 5:18 AM, Masahiro Yamada wrote:
> > include/linux/compiler-intel.h had no update in the past 3 years.
> >
> > We often forget about the third C compiler to build the kernel.
> >
> > For example, commit a0a12c3ed057 ("asm goto: eradicate CC_HAS_ASM_GOTO")
> > only mentioned GCC and Clang.
> >
> > init/Kconfig defines CC_IS_GCC and CC_IS_CLANG but not CC_IS_ICC,
> > and nobody has reported any issue.
> >
> > I guess the Intel Compiler support is broken, and nobody is caring
> > about it.
> >
> > Signed-off-by: Masahiro Yamada <masahiroy@xxxxxxxxxx>
> > ---
> >
> > I am sending this to Linus and the x86 maintainers with RFC.
> > If somebody is still using ICC, please speak up!
>
> Acked-by: Arnd Bergmann <arnd@xxxxxxxx>
>
>
> I had the same thought a while back and tried to show that it as
> already broken, but I never managed to actually download the compiler
> at the time.
>
> It appears that in the meantime, Intel have completely dropped their
> old codebase and moved to using LLVM[1], so my guess is that with the
> current releases it will behave the same as clang. It might help
> to verify that this is indeed the case if you want to add that
> to the changelog text.

This is my thought, too. I'm happy to help folks working on icx to
get icx up and running for kernel builds, if there's interest.

Change LGTM; there's probably some refactoring we might be able to do
as a result of this; we might be able to move more common definitions
out of include/linux/compiler-gcc.h and include/linux/compiler-clang.h
into include/linux/compiler_types.h, but that can wait until after
this change.

Reviewed-by: Nick Desaulniers <ndesaulniers@xxxxxxxxxx>

>
> Arnd
>
> [1] https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/developer/articles/technical/adoption-of-llvm-complete-icx.html



--
Thanks,
~Nick Desaulniers