Zack's Kernel News
Zack's Kernel News

Chronicler Zack Brown reports on the latest news, views, dilemmas, and developments within the Linux kernel community.
A Butterfly Flaps Its Wings
Andy Shevchenko, who is not a butterfly, happened to remark one day on the Linux Kernel Mailing List: "would it make sense to enable -Werror for default warning level, let's say W=0, at some point?" And this ended up producing great storms of change across the world.
The -Werror
option is a command-line option for the GNU C Compiler (GCC). When compiling, GCC will detect many errors in your code, report them to you, and abort the attempt to compile your code. Perhaps you haven't quite made a real error, but your code is still not a good usage of the C language. In that case, GCC produces a warning instead and continues chugging away to build your executable. However, maybe you are so enthusiastic about proper C usage that you want GCC to treat those bad usages as if they were errors. The -Werror
option tells GCC to do that.
Masahiro Yamada pointed out to Andy that "Every GCC release adds new warning options." And that "Enabling -Werror by default means the kernel build is suddenly broken with new compilers."
[...]
Buy this article as PDF
(incl. VAT)
Buy Linux Magazine
Subscribe to our Linux Newsletters
Find Linux and Open Source Jobs
Subscribe to our ADMIN Newsletters
Support Our Work
Linux Magazine content is made possible with support from readers like you. Please consider contributing when you’ve found an article to be beneficial.

News
-
Linux Kernel 6.16 Released with Minor Fixes
The latest Linux kernel doesn't really include any big-ticket features, just a lot of lines of code.
-
EU Sovereign Tech Fund Gains Traction
OpenForum Europe recently released a report regarding a sovereign tech fund with backing from several significant entities.
-
FreeBSD Promises a Full Desktop Installer
FreeBSD has lacked an option to include a full desktop environment during installation.
-
Linux Hits an Important Milestone
If you pay attention to the news in the Linux-sphere, you've probably heard that the open source operating system recently crashed through a ceiling no one thought possible.
-
Plasma Bigscreen Returns
A developer discovered that the Plasma Bigscreen feature had been sitting untouched, so he decided to do something about it.
-
CachyOS Now Lets Users Choose Their Shell
Imagine getting the opportunity to select which shell you want during the installation of your favorite Linux distribution. That's now a thing.
-
Wayland 1.24 Released with Fixes and New Features
Wayland continues to move forward, while X11 slowly vanishes into the shadows, and the latest release includes plenty of improvements.
-
Bugs Found in sudo
Two critical flaws allow users to gain access to root privileges.
-
Fedora Continues 32-Bit Support
In a move that should come as a relief to some portions of the Linux community, Fedora will continue supporting 32-bit architecture.
-
Linux Kernel 6.17 Drops bcachefs
After a clash over some late fixes and disagreements between bcachefs's lead developer and Linus Torvalds, bachefs is out.