Zack's Kernel News

Zack's Kernel News

Article from Issue 239/2020
Author(s):

Chronicler Zack Brown reports cleaning up build warnings, improving (?) kernel code generation, and working around missing future compiler features.

Cleaning Up Build Warnings

Linus Torvalds recently upgraded his home system to use the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) 10, which is not as important as it might sound. It doesn't mean everyone should use version 10 or anything like that. However, Linus did notice that after the upgrade, compiling the Linux kernel would spit out vast and copious quantities of warning messages.

In fact, he said, "I let them go for a while, in the belief that I could deal with it, but then yesterday I did a pull and didn't initially even notice that the end result didn't compile for me, because the build error was hidden by the hundreds of lines of warnings."

He added, "a lot of them were good warnings where gcc warns about things it really should warn about – if you have modern source code and actually use flexible arrays etc. Which we're moving towards, but we're not there yet, and clearly won't be for 5.7."

[...]

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