Re: Avoiding builds with old gcc

Blake A. Jones (blakej@foo.caltech.edu)
Tue, 21 May 1996 21:41:18 -0700

In mlist.linux-kernel, Paul Gortmaker <Paul.Gortmaker@anu.edu.au> writes:
>Here is a patch that we should have before v2.x -- It will stop people
>from building buggy kernels with old gcc versions (and thus lodging bogus
>bug reports) as seen below.

I've seen people (Alan) say that old gcc's produce incorrect code, but I
have yet to see an example of it.

rift-1: uptime
9:32pm up 4 days, 20:14, 0 users, load average: 0.06, 0.08, 0.02
rift-2: uname -a
Linux rift 1.99.4 #2-pre-2.0 Tue May 14 21:51:26 PDT 1996 i486
rift-3: gcc -v
Reading specs from /usr/lib/gcc-lib/i486-linux/2.5.8/specs
gcc version 2.5.8

I ran 1.3.97 for two weeks, compiled with gcc 2.5.8, only rebooting to
go to a higher kernel. The computer gets a decent amount of net traffic,
and I haven't had *any* problems, except the occasional "Socket destroy
delayed", which from what I understand is not at all a gcc-related issue.

I agree that a new gcc is a good thing, and I plan to upgrade soon. But
I'd really like to at least know exactly what problems I *should* be
seeing with a gcc-2.5.8-compiled kernel before I'd be comfortable being
officially obsoleted.

Blake