Re: [PLUG] RedHat 7.1 glibc2.1 Backward compat - revisited

[gabriel rosenkoetter <gr@eclipsed.net>]

On Thu, May 24, 2001 at 12:13:44PM -0400, Tim Peeler wrote:
> On Thu, May 24, 2001 at 12:08:47PM -0400, Fred K Ollinger wrote:
> > 	Also, how can a compiler be incompatible w/ a kernel. What does
> The kernel needs the compiler to align bits properly, inline functions
> properly, initialize static values in the binary properly and hundreds
> of other things.

I'm not so sure about that necessarily being the problem here; I
mean, for example, if you weren't aligning ints along 4 byte
boundaries, you wouldn't be able to use the binary sensibly under
*any* conditions, and the gcc shipped with RedHat 7.x *does* compile
binaries that run just fine on their own.

I understood the problem to be that first, the gcc shipped with RH
7.x *can't* compile Linux kernel code (which, though it's a bit
intricate and convoluted, is not particularly outlandish in its
usage), and second, because a separate gcc was used for the kernel,
it was necessary to build any device drivers or LKMs you were
compiling locally with a gcc matching that of the kernel rather than
that of the system. This, it seems to me, would quickly lead to
other problems if the device driver or LKM needed to interact with
libraries outside the kernel. Not to mention the situation of
compiling a third-party LKM with uses GNU autoconf, detects the gcc
you don't want to use for kernel stuff, then fails to build with it.
This makes things pretty difficult for the intermediate level
sysadmin of a RedHat system who does know basically how to compile
software locally, given autoconf, but isn't aware of the
implications of this broken gcc/kgcc scheme.

       ~ g r @ eclipsed.net


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