Hei hei,

Am Sun, May 02, 2021 at 11:30:07PM +0100 schrieb Matthew Wilcox:

On Sun, May 02, 2021 at 02:08:31PM -0700, Linus Torvalds wrote:

quoted

What is relevant is what version of gcc various distributions actually
have reasonably easily available, and how old and relevant the
distributions are. We did decide that (just as an example) RHEL 7 was
too old to worry about when we updated the gcc version requirement
last time.

Last year, Arnd and Kirill (maybe others were involved too) made a
list of distros and older gcc versions. But I don't think anybody
actually _maintains_ such a list. It would be perhaps interesting to
have some way to check what compiler versions are being offered by
different distros.

fwiw, Debian 9 aka Stretch released June 2017 had gcc 6.3
Debian 10 aka Buster released June 2019 had gcc 7.4 *and* 8.3.
Debian 8 aka Jessie had gcc-4.8.4 and gcc-4.9.2.

So do we care about people who haven't bothered to upgrade userspace
since 2017?  If so, we can't go past 4.9.

Desktops and servers are all nice, however I just want to make you
aware, there are embedded users forced to stick to older cross
toolchains for different reasons as well, e.g. in industrial
environment. :-)

This is no show stopper for us, I just wanted to let you be aware.

Greets
Alex