Linux Developers Look At Upping The GCC Requirements For Building The Kernel

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Linux Developers Look At Upping The GCC Requirements For Building The Kernel

Kernel developer Arnd Bergmann has started a discussion over upping the minimum GCC version that's supported for building the Linux kernel. He's been testing every GCC compiler release from 4.0 through GCC 7 to see the results when building the Linux kernel...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Linux-Kernel-GCC-2016-Limits

[indepe]

According to https://access.redhat.com/articles/3078, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 is still using Linux kernels from the 2.x era, and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 is using kernels from the 3.x era.

So why add patches to Linux 4.9 or 4.10 in thought of RH6 still using GCC 4.4? Or are kernels 2.x still being updated, and these patches are for kernel 2.x ?

Or does RH have their own kernel numbering scheme, and these are actually newer kernels?

[Xelix]

According to https://access.redhat.com/articles/3078, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 is still using Linux kernels from the 2.x era, and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 is using kernels from the 3.x era.

So why add patches to Linux 4.9 or 4.10 in thought of RH6 still using GCC 4.4? Or are kernels 2.x still being updated, and these patches are for kernel 2.x ?

Or does RH have their own kernel numbering scheme, and these are actually newer kernels?

You are forgetting about people who want to run a more recent kernel on RH6/7. This sounds like a rather common use case to me.

[starshipeleven]

According to https://access.redhat.com/articles/3078, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 is still using Linux kernels from the 2.x era, and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 is using kernels from the 3.x era.

RH has its own fork of the kernel and is responsible of its maintenance.

[rubdos]

According to https://access.redhat.com/articles/3078, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 is still using Linux kernels from the 2.x era, and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 is using kernels from the 3.x era.

So why add patches to Linux 4.9 or 4.10 in thought of RH6 still using GCC 4.4? Or are kernels 2.x still being updated, and these patches are for kernel 2.x ?

Or does RH have their own kernel numbering scheme, and these are actually newer kernels?

To elaborate on @starshipeleven's answer: Red Hat uses a kernel from the 2.X era's and backports bugfixes to it. Same for RHEL 7; they're on Linux 3.10.xxx, which is 3.10 with some btrfs backports and bugfixes.

[starshipeleven]

You are forgetting about people who want to run a more recent kernel on RH6/7. This sounds like a rather common use case to me.

I somewhat doubt that many people (mostly IT admins) want to run a more recent kernel in RHEL.

[indepe]

So that's to help RH with backporting a few things from 4.9 to 2.6... and without updating GCC ?

[indepe]

I somewhat doubt that many people (mostly IT admins) want to run a more recent kernel in RHEL.

And even in RHEL 6... they are now at RHEL 7.3.

[starshipeleven]

So that's to help RH with backporting a few things from 4.9 to 2.6... and without updating GCC ?

Nothing. RH has their own dev teams to do that.

And even in RHEL 6... they are now at RHEL 7.3.

In whatever RHEL. That's a server, if they were working fine 5 years ago they will still be fine now. They only need security/stability patches.

[Xelix]

I somewhat doubt that many people (mostly IT admins) want to run a more recent kernel in RHEL.

Why not? One could want a recent kernel to get recent features/support for recent hardware but also keep a conservative userland. In this case, running a recent kernel on an older distribution makes sense. It's kind of similar to what Ubuntu does for its LTS releases: They release a "hardware enablement stack" as an update to their LTS in order to bring a recent kernel + graphic stack to their LTS releases while retaining the original userland.

I am not saying that this is what most people will want, but I can definitely picture some users wanting this.