> Yup. egcs /generally/ works, but you won't get so much sympathy if
> something breaks. If you must use it, grab the 1.1.2 release
> (egcs-2.91.66); IIRC earlier versions had bugs. Later versions may also
> cause problems: the (pre-??) versions of gcc-2.95 that are floating
> around apparently cause problems if you don't use -fno-strict-aliasing; I
> don't know if they're OK if you do use that flag.
AFAIK, 1.1.2 has problems too, they were fixed in RedHat's updates.
> Specifically, there's a nasty warning for IDEDMA_NEW_DRIVE_LISTINGS in
> Configure.help about using egcs; I haven't risked it :)
This option is prominently marked EXPERIMENTAL, and no data except that
"some egcs versions miscompile this" are given... not very useful as a bug
report for the compiler, in my book. Saying that gcc-2.8.1 compiles this OK
is worthless, as that one is _way_ broken elsewhere. And it very well might
be a kernel error (the current -fno-strict-aliasing flag is there to work
around illegal code in the kernel (very pervasive and hard to find/fix,
unfortunately), not a gcc bug; BTW this inhibits useful optimizations).
gcc-2.95 is around the corner, its prereleases generate _much_ better code
than gcc-2.7.2. I have been compiling my kernels with egcs (lately gcc-2.95
snapshots, after EGCS got appointed keeper of GCC in April) for more than a
year and a half now with mostly minor hickups (if that much), many others
have done so too. The problems that surfaced have generally promptly been
fixed. Many distributions ship kernels compiled with egcs.
gcc-2.7.2 is going to go away soon.
-- Horst von Brand vonbrand@sleipnir.valparaiso.cl Casilla 9G, Viņa del Mar, Chile +56 32 672616- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.rutgers.edu Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/