On Mon, 24 Apr 2017, Arnd Bergmann wrote:
If there's no real good reason (brokenness) to deprecate gcc-4.1, I would not do it.I guess most people using old compilers know what they're doing.
What I'm trying to find out first is whether "people regularly using 10+ year old compilers for the latest kernels" is a strict subset of "people in Geert's household".
Well I do not live with Geert TBH.
Given that none of the three architectures I looked at (arm, mips, x86) has successfully built any defconfig for a few years, it's quite possible that it's just you ;-) The other architectures that were around 10 years ago (so they might have someone who still has old toolchain binaries) and that still exist today are alpha, cris, frv, ia64, m32r, parisc, powerpc, s390, sh, sparc and xtensa. The first six are similar to m68k in that the hardware is mostly obsolete and the ports are kept around to support those old systems that might also use ancient toolchains, or new toolchains may be unmaintained or buggy, which could be a reason to keep 4.1 supported or at least try to find out if 4.1 (or even any other version) still works at all.
Huh?
$ git log -1 commit 5a7ad1146caa895ad718a534399e38bd2ba721b7 Author: Linus Torvalds torvalds@linux-foundation.org Date: Sun Apr 23 16:53:00 2017 -0700
Linux 4.11-rc8 $ /usr/bin/time make ARCH=mips CROSS_COMPILE=mipsel-linux- decstation_defconfig vmlinux >/dev/null 2>&1 1014.19user 71.47system 19:33.24elapsed 92%CPU (0avgtext+0avgdata 0maxresident)k18764inputs+242504outputs (704major+9549837minor)pagefaults 0swaps $ mipsel-linux-gcc --version gcc (GCC) 4.1.2 Copyright (C) 2006 Free Software Foundation, Inc. This is free software; see the source for copying conditions. There is NO warranty; not even for MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. $
Methinks it builds just fine.
Maciej