Re: Aarch64 EXT4FS inode checksum failures - seems to be weak memory ordering issues

[Arnd Bergmann <arnd@kernel.org>]

On Thu, Jan 7, 2021 at 2:37 PM Russell King - ARM Linux admin
<linux@armlinux.org.uk> wrote:
> On Thu, Jan 07, 2021 at 02:16:25PM +0100, Arnd Bergmann wrote:
> > On Thu, Jan 7, 2021 at 1:47 PM Russell King - ARM Linux admin
> > <linux@armlinux.org.uk> wrote:
>
> > The gcc bugzilla mentions backports into gcc-linaro, but I do not see
> > them in my git history.

Correction: I looked in the wrong branch, gcc-linaro does have it, as
does the Android gcc, which was recently still at 4.9 before they dropped it
in favor of clang.

> So, do we raise the minimum gcc version for the kernel as a whole to 5.1
> or just for aarch64?

I'd personally love to see gcc-5 as the global minimum version, as that
would let us finally use --std=gnu11 features instead of gnu89. [There are
a couple of useful features that are incompatible with gnu89, and
gnu99/gnu11 support in gcc didn't like the kernel sources]

If we make it arm64 specific, I'd propose only making it a build-time
warning instead of an error, as there are no other benefits to increasing
the minimum version if gcc-4.9 is still an option for other architectures,
and most gcc-4.9 users (Android, Red Hat and everyone using gcc-linaro)
have backported this bugfix already.

         Arnd