linux-kernel - Re: [PATCH 0/4] Make gcc-8.1 and binutils-2.30 the minimum version

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Message-Id: <0d087503-88d5-4d66-aa52-161ca6e0df06@app.fastmail.com>
Date: Tue, 08 Apr 2025 09:43:10 +0200
From: "Arnd Bergmann" <arnd@...db.de>
To: "Eric Biggers" <ebiggers@...nel.org>, "Arnd Bergmann" <arnd@...nel.org>
Cc: linux-kbuild@...r.kernel.org, "H. Peter Anvin" <hpa@...or.com>,
 "Ard Biesheuvel" <ardb@...nel.org>, "Borislav Petkov" <bp@...en8.de>,
 "Brian Gerst" <brgerst@...il.com>,
 "Catalin Marinas" <catalin.marinas@....com>,
 "Dave Hansen" <dave.hansen@...ux.intel.com>,
 "Herbert Xu" <herbert@...dor.apana.org.au>, "Ingo Molnar" <mingo@...hat.com>,
 "Jonathan Corbet" <corbet@....net>, "Marc Zyngier" <maz@...nel.org>,
 "Mark Rutland" <mark.rutland@....com>,
 "Masahiro Yamada" <masahiroy@...nel.org>,
 "Nathan Chancellor" <nathan@...nel.org>,
 "Nicolas Schier" <nicolas@...sle.eu>, "Takashi Iwai" <tiwai@...e.com>,
 "Thomas Gleixner" <tglx@...utronix.de>, "Uros Bizjak" <ubizjak@...il.com>,
 "Will Deacon" <will@...nel.org>, linux-arm-kernel@...ts.infradead.org,
 linux-crypto@...r.kernel.org, linux-doc@...r.kernel.org,
 linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org, linux-raid@...r.kernel.org, x86@...nel.org
Subject: Re: [PATCH 0/4] Make gcc-8.1 and binutils-2.30 the minimum version

On Mon, Apr 7, 2025, at 18:41, Eric Biggers wrote:
> On Mon, Apr 07, 2025 at 11:41:12AM +0200, Arnd Bergmann wrote:
>
> This is intended to supersede the patches from Uros that removed checks for
> binutils < 2.25, right?  See:
>
> * 
> https://lore.kernel.org/linux-crypto/20250404074135.520812-1-ubizjak@gmail.com/
> * 
> https://lore.kernel.org/linux-crypto/20250404074135.520812-2-ubizjak@gmail.com
> * 
> https://lore.kernel.org/linux-crypto/20250404074135.520812-3-ubizjak@gmail.com/

I missed these, but it does sounds we easy to work out, either
by rebasing my patch or dropping Uros' version.

> If we can indeed bump up the requirement to 2.30, that would be great.
>
> Just a note though: I recently added VAES and VPCLMULQDQ instructions to
> BoringSSL, which increased the binutils requirement of building BoringSSL to
> 2.30, and this caused issues in a downstream project; e.g. see
> https://github.com/briansmith/ring/issues/2463.  Specifically people complained
> about being unable to build on Amazon Linux 2 and CentOS/RHEL/Oracle Linux 7.
>
> So I just thought I'd mention that, based on past experience with this sort of
> thing, those are the specific cases where it seems people are most likely to be
> trying to use binutils < 2.30.
>
> But if those distros are not going to be supported any longer (without
> installing newer tools on them), or even are already unsupported due to the gcc
> requirement, bumping up the binutils requirement to 2.30 sounds good to me.

RHEL7 comes wit gcc-4.8.5, which is already too old to build the kernel,
so I'm not worried about it at all. RHEL8 and Debian 10 have gcc-8,
which is why that makes sense as a new minimum version.

SLES-15 (gcc-7), Debian 9 (gcc-6), and Ubuntu 18.05 (gcc-7) are the
ones that can currently build mainline kernels but are broken by this
change. SLES-15 is the only one of those that are still supported, but
they do ship with add-on compilers.

     Arnd