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From:   Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Date:   Sun, 11 Feb 2018 12:06:35 -0800
Message-ID: <CA+55aFy4WNC=pmga19CHhrX9QwOJsu1bUvGL0oNxq5EeMW94eg@mail.gmail.com>
Subject: Re: [RFC PATCH 4/7] kconfig: support new special property shell=
To:     Kees Cook <keescook@chromium.org>
Cc:     Ulf Magnusson <ulfalizer@gmail.com>,
        Masahiro Yamada <yamada.masahiro@socionext.com>,
        Linux Kbuild mailing list <linux-kbuild@vger.kernel.org>,
        Greg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@linuxfoundation.org>,
        Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>,
        Nicolas Pitre <nicolas.pitre@linaro.org>,
        "Luis R . Rodriguez" <mcgrof@suse.com>,
        Randy Dunlap <rdunlap@infradead.org>,
        Sam Ravnborg <sam@ravnborg.org>,
        Michal Marek <michal.lkml@markovi.net>,
        Martin Schwidefsky <schwidefsky@de.ibm.com>,
        Pavel Machek <pavel@ucw.cz>,
        linux-s390 <linux-s390@vger.kernel.org>,
        Jiri Kosina <jkosina@suse.cz>,
        Linux Kernel Mailing List <linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org>,
        Tejun Heo <tj@kernel.org>, Ingo Molnar <mingo@kernel.org>,
        "Van De Ven, Arjan" <arjan.van.de.ven@intel.com>,
        Arnd Bergmann <arnd@arndb.de>
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On Sun, Feb 11, 2018 at 11:53 AM, Linus Torvalds
<torvalds@linux-foundation.org> wrote:
>
> Well, it's still not a very *big* bump. With modern distros being at
> 7.3, and people testing pre-releases of gcc-8, something like gcc-4.5
> is still pretty darn ancient.

... it's worth noting that our _documentation_ may claim that gcc-3.2
is the minimum supported version, but Arnd pointed out that a few
months ago that apparently nothing older than 4.1 has actually worked
for a longish while, and gcc-4.3 was needed on several architectures.

So the _real_ jump in required gcc version would be from 4.1 (4.3 in
many cases) to 4.5, not from our documented "3.2 minimum".

Arnd claimed that some architectures needed even newer-than-4.3, but I
assume that's limited to things like RISC-V that simply don't have old
gcc support at all.

That was from a discussion about bug report that only happened with
gcc-4.4, and was because gcc-4.4 did insane things, so we were talking
about how it wasn't necessarily worth supporting.

So we really have had a lot of unrelated reasons why just saying
"gcc-4.5 or newer"  would be a good thing.

            Linus