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

[David Laight]

On Mon, 7 Apr 2025 09:41:51 -0700
Eric Biggers <ebiggers at kernel.org> wrote:

> On Mon, Apr 07, 2025 at 11:41:12AM +0200, Arnd Bergmann wrote:
> > From: Arnd Bergmann <arnd at arndb.de>
> > 
> > x86 already requires gcc-8.1 since linux-6.15-rc1, which led me to
> > actually go through all  version checks and make this is the minimum
> > for all architectures.
> > 
> > Most of the actual resulting changes are actually for raising the
> > binutils version, which eliminates version checks on x86 and arm64.
> > 
> > Arnd Bergmann (4):
> >   kbuild: require gcc-8 and binutils-2.30
> >   raid6: skip avx512 checks
> >   x86: remove checks for binutils-2.30 and earlier
> >   arm64: drop binutils version checks  
> 
> 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/
> 
> 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.

Just tell them RHEL 7 is no longer supported :-)
(Was a right PITA installing an extra package on a CentOS 7 system we use as
a build machine...)

In any case it is relatively easy to install a later gcc - even though it ends
up in a very obscure place.

	David

> 
> 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.
> 
> - Eric
>