The first half of the 6.6 merge window [LWN.net]

The first half of the 6.6 merge window

Posted Sep 11, 2023 19:25 UTC (Mon) by mb (subscriber, #50428)
In reply to: The first half of the 6.6 merge window by pizza
Parent article: The first half of the 6.6 merge window

Do you want to wait for all the gcc extensions used by the kernel to land in an official C standard before you can use such a kernel?
It's the same thing.

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The first half of the 6.6 merge window

Posted Sep 11, 2023 20:32 UTC (Mon) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link] (2 responses)

> Do you want to wait for all the gcc extensions used by the kernel to land in an official C standard before you can use such a kernel? It's the same thing.

It's only the same thing if each kernel release required you to use the latest release of GCC because "C is stable but the features we need are not."

(Meanwhile, the kernel only requires GCC 5.1, which was released over eight years ago. So.. yeah, not the same thing at all)

The first half of the 6.6 merge window

Posted Sep 12, 2023 6:03 UTC (Tue) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link] (1 responses)

Some kernel features like control flow integrity checking or shadow stacks (just merged) require a much newer GCC.

Yes, Rust is even newer than that. But that's a distinction without a difference: some kernel features require very new toolchains.

The first half of the 6.6 merge window

Posted Sep 12, 2023 6:17 UTC (Tue) by mb (subscriber, #50428) [Link]

Correct.
Some Distributions even used to ship a special gcc compiler just for compiling the kernel.
The kernel has very special requirements. That's true for C and Rust alike.
And I really don't see why that would be a problem.