Re: [PATCH v2 00/10] Rework READ_ONCE() to improve codegen

[Qais Yousef]

On 01/23/20 14:01, Arvind Sankar wrote:
> On Thu, Jan 23, 2020 at 10:45:08AM -0800, Nick Desaulniers wrote:
> > On Thu, Jan 23, 2020 at 9:32 AM David Laight <David.Laight@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> > >
> > > From: Will Deacon
> > > > Sent: 23 January 2020 17:17
> > > >
> > > > I think it depends how much we care about those older compilers. My series
> > > > first moves it to "Good luck mate, you're on your own" and then follows up
> > 
> > I wish the actual warning was worded that way. :P
> > 
> > > > with a "Let me take that off you it's sharp".
> > 
> > > Oh - and I need to find a newer compiler :-(
> > 
> > What distro are you using? Does it have a package for a newer
> > compiler?  I'm honestly curious about what policies if any the kernel
> > has for supporting developer's toolchains from their distributions.
> > (ie. Arnd usually has pretty good stats what distro's use which
> > version of GCC and are still supported; Do we strive to not break
> > them? Is asking kernel devs to compile their own toolchain too much to
> > ask?  Is it still if they're using really old distro's/toolchains that
> > we don't want to support?  Do we survey kernel devs about what they're
> > using?).  Apologies if this is already documented somewhere, but if
> > not I'd eventually like to brainstorm and write it down somewhere in
> > the tree.  Documentation/process/changes.rst doesn't really answer the
> > above questions, I think.
> > 
> > -- 
> > Thanks,
> > ~Nick Desaulniers
> 
> Reposting Arnd's link
> https://www.spinics.net/lists/linux-kbuild/msg23648.html

This list seems to be x86 centric? I remember when the switch to GCC 4.6
happened a couple or more archs had to be dropped because they lacked a newer
compiler.

So popular archs would probably have moved quickly, but 'niche' ones might
still be catching up at a slower pace.

--
Qais Yousef