Re: [GIT PULL] EFI fixes

[Linus Torvalds]

On Sun, Jun 28, 2020 at 11:26 AM Ingo Molnar <mingo@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> - Fix build regression on v4.8 and older

Interesting.

It's perhaps yet another reason to just skip gcc-4.8 too, since
apparently 4.9 works.

gcc-4.9 really has a lot of advantages. It's where (I think) gcc
basically supports all C11 things, including _Generic() but also
__auto_type.

So if we just say that we only care about gcc-4.9 upwards, it frees us
to clean up some (really) old constructions where we've been using
macros with sizeof and/or typeof, and make the code potentially rather
more readable and often more compact.

Yeah, I know we _just_ made the minimum compiler version be 4.8, but I
do get the feeling that we should just have bitten the bullet and gone
all the way to 4.9.

Arnd, what was the reason for 4.8 support? I'm assuming there's some
sad unfortunate distro that still uses that ancient compiler..

Ok, ok, 4.9 isn't exactly new either (4.9.0 released May 2014, and
final 4.9 release was 2016), but 4.9 really from a feature angle is a
much saner thing than 4.8.

Afaik, the main "interesting" part of gcc-4.8 was that it was when gcc
switched over to be built as C++. That's perhaps a huge milestone for
gcc itself, but not necessarily for the users..

Arnd? You're the one who tends to keep track of these things..

             Linus