Re: [RFC PATCH] compiler.h: give up __compiletime_assert_fallback()

From: Linus Torvalds
Date: Sun Aug 19 2018 - 17:02:12 EST


On Sun, Aug 19, 2018 at 1:36 PM Nick Desaulniers
<ndesaulniers@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> On Sun, Aug 19, 2018 at 1:28 PM Linus Torvalds
> <torvalds@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> >
> > Well, it turns out that we effectively stopped supporting gcc < 4.6
> > during this merge window for other reasons, so..
>
> For the whole kernel (or just a particular arch)? Which commit? Do
> we keep track of minimal versions somewhere?

It's effectively for the whole kernel right now. See:

https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/20180814170904.GA12768@xxxxxxxxxxxx/

although it might be fixable. Nobody really *wants* to fix it, though,
because we've had that initializer issue before too, and various other
issues with old gcc versions.

So we have long had reasons why we'd _want_ to upgrade to at least gcc-4.6

The "we support gcc-3.2" in Documentation/process/changes.rst is
complete fantasy.

Linus