Messages in this thread | | | From | Arvind Sankar <> | Date | Tue, 24 Mar 2020 18:01:47 -0400 | Subject | Re: [PATCH] Documentation/changes: Raise minimum supported binutils version to 2.23 |
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On Tue, Mar 24, 2020 at 05:42:05PM -0400, Arvind Sankar wrote: > On Tue, Mar 24, 2020 at 05:48:12PM +0100, Borislav Petkov wrote: > > On Tue, Mar 24, 2020 at 09:37:13AM -0700, Linus Torvalds wrote: > > > I think it's ok. It's not going to cause any _subtle_ failures, it's > > > going to cause very clear "oh, now it doesn't build" errors. > > > > > > No? > > > > > > And binutils 2.23 is what, 7+ years old by now and apparently had > > > known failure cases too. > > > > > > But if there are silent and subtle failures, that might be a reason to > > > be careful. Are there? > > > > Well, not that I know of and that's why I'm being overly cautious. Maybe > > too cautious but a lot of hectic testing of last minute fixes in the > > past have taught me to take my time. > > > > And since it doesn't really matter when the patch goes in - there's > > always the next merge window - I would prefer to take our time and have > > it simmer in -next for max period. > > > > So yeah, 2.23 has been tested for a long time now and it is very likely > > that nothing would happen and if you think it's ok, then sure. Then if > > you happen to see urgent pull requests with build or some other fixes, > > at least you'll be prepared. :-) > > > > This is just a documentation patch right? Nothing actually changes with > the build. The only possible thing that we would potentially have to > deal with is > > (1) people noticing the doc change and complaining that they > still need to use binutils-2.21 for some reason -- but they can't > currently build an x86 kernel without patches anyway, so...
The __end_of_kernel_reserve symbol that breaks with the 2.21-2.22 binutils was added in v5.3, so we've already gone 3 kernel versions without complaints.
> > (2) people noticing the doc change and suggesting moving to 2.26 or some > later version instead of 2.23.
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