Re: Linux 2.4.34-pre1

[Mikael Pettersson <mikpe@csd.uu.se>]

Andreas Steinmetz writes:
 > Arjan van de Ven wrote:
 > > But maybe it's worth doing a user survey to find out what the users of
 > > 2.4 want... (and with that I mean users of the kernel.org 2.4 kernels,
 > > people who use enterprise distro kernels don't count for this since
 > > they'll not go to a newer released 2.4 anyway)
 > 
 > Currently I'm working with ARM based embedded systems. I prefer 2.4
 > kernels to 2.6 as they are smaller thus leaving more flash for jffs2.
 > Not speaking of the kernel a gcc 4.1.1 compile of code for a LPC2103
 > resulted in a clearly smaller binary as the same compile with gcc 3.4.
 > Thus I really would like to be able to use gcc 4.x with 2.4 kernels.
 > There are even kernel miscompiles with gcc 3.4 that might be fixed with
 > gcc 4 (one has to try).

I've done a fair amount of ARM user-space hacking recently, and the
number of bug fixes one has to apply to gcc-3.3 or gcc-3.4 to make it
even semi-correct on ARM is scary. Since these versions aren't supported
any more, being able to use newer, hopefully less buggy, and _supported_
gcc versions is clearly beneficial.

Of course, this is not an issue for x86 users.