Linus Torvalds : Linux 2.6.35-rc1 is out!

From: Linus Torvalds;
Sender: linux-kernel-owner
Date: Sun, 30 May 2010 14:11:09
To: Linux Kernel Mailing List;
Subject: Linux 2.6.35-rc1


It's been two weeks, and so the merge window is closed. There may be a few
trees I haven't pulled yet, but the bulk should all be there. And please,
let's try to make the merge window mean something this time - don't send
me any new pull request unless they are for real regressions or for major
bugs, ok?

This time, there are no new filesystems (surprise surprise), but there's
certainly been filesystem work both on an individual FS layer (btrfs,
cept, cifs, ext4, nfs, ocfs2 and xfs) and at the VFS layer (superblock
and quota cleanups in particular).

But as usual, the bulk of the changes are in drivers. About two thirds of
all the changes, to be exact. infiniband, networking and staging drivers
are the bulk of it, but there's changes all over (drm, sound, media, usb,
input layer, you name it).

And what's good to see is that we continue to have very healthy
statistics. About 8500 commits (of which 400+ are merges), with about a
thousand individual developers involved (git counts 1047, but some of them
are bound to be duplicates due to people mis-spelling their names etc).
It's skewed, of course - with the median number of commits per person
being just three - but I think that's what we want to see in a healthy
development environment.

Linus

H Peter Anvin : Does anyone care about gcc 3.x support for *x86* anymore?

Just forwarding email in linux-kernel mailing list.

-----Original Message-----
From: "H. Peter Anvin"
Sender: linux-kernel-owner [at] vger [dot] kernel [dot] org
Date: Tue, 18 May 2010 18:19:41
Subject: Does anyone care about gcc 3.x support for *x86* anymore?

[Reposting as a separate thread]

Recently, we have seen an increasing number of problems with gcc 3.4 on
x86; mostly due to poor constant propagation producing not just bad code
but failing to properly eliminate what should be dead code.

I'm wondering if there is any remaining real use of gcc 3.4 on x86 for
compiling current kernels (as opposed to residual use for compiling
applications on old enterprise distros.) I'm specifically not referring
to other architectures here -- most of these issues have been in
relation to low-level arch-specific code, and as such only affects the
x86 architectures. Other architectures may very well have a much
stronger need for continued support of an older toolchain.

If there isn't a reason to preserve support, I would like to consider
discontinue support for using gcc 3 to compile x86 kernels. If there is
a valid use case, it would be good to know what it is.

-hpa

--
H. Peter Anvin, Intel Open Source Technology Center
I work for Intel. I don't speak on their behalf.