On 16/04/17 20:52, Kees Cook wrote:
Was there a conclusion to this discussion? I didn't see anything definitive in the thread...
Notes below...
On Fri, Dec 16, 2016 at 3:14 AM, Arnd Bergmann arnd@arndb.de wrote:
[Fixed linux-arm-kernel mailing list address, sorry for the duplicate, I'm not reposting all the ugly patches though, unless someone really wants them, https://lkml.org/lkml/2016/12/16/174 has a copy]
On Friday, December 16, 2016 11:56:21 AM CET Arnd Bergmann wrote:
I had some fun doing build testing with older gcc versions, building every release from 4.0 through 7.0 and running that on my randconfig setup to see what comes out.
First of all, gcc-4.9 and higher is basically warning-free everywhere, although gcc-7 introduces some interesting new warnings (I have started doing patches for those as well). gcc-4.8 is probably good, too, and gcc-4.6 and 4.7 at least don't produce build failures in general, though the level of false-positive warnings increases (we could decide to turn those off for older compilers for build test purposes).
In gcc-4.5 and below, dead code elimination is not as good as later, causing a couple of link errors, and some of them have no good workaround (see patch 1). It would be nice to declare that version too old, but several older distros that are still in wide use ship with compilers earlier than 4.6:
RHEL6: gcc-4.4
This appears to have support until July 31, 2018. (Though it's using a 2.6 kernel.)
Debian 6: gcc-4.4
This went fully unsupported on Feb 29, 2016.
Ubuntu 10.04: gcc-4.4
This went fully unsupported on Apr 30, 2015.
SLES11: gcc-4.3
General support ends Mar 31 2019, fully unsupported 31 Mar 2022. (And like RHEL6 is using a 2.6 kernel.)
fyi, SLES11 upgraded to kernel 3.0, in SP2.
https://www.novell.com/support/kb/doc.php?id=3594951
Cheers Suzuki