[U-Boot] [PATCH] arm: Make gcc 6.0 or later a hard requirement now.

[Dr. Philipp Tomsich]

> On 4 Dec 2017, at 20:02, Stephen Warren <swarren at wwwdotorg.org> wrote:
> 
> On 12/02/2017 06:12 PM, Tom Rini wrote:
>> Move the warning to an error as we have been promising would happen in
>> this release.
> 
> Oh. This has broken my U-Boot build/test system. I guess it's entirely my fault for interpreting the "2018.01" warning as "you'll need to fix this in Jan 2018", not "you'll need to fix this as soon as development starts for 2018.01":-(
> 
> Is there a reason for requiring such an extremely new gcc, as opposed to simply something not ancient?

GCC-6 matches the definition of “not ancient”.
We’ve just gone to phase 3 on GCC-8 a few weeks back, so GCC-6 will be 2 years old in April.

Usually, toolchains for embedded targets are maintained on a “stable” and “one behind-stable” basis.
Which already makes GCC-6 the oldest toolchain that will receive backports.  For example, Linaro now has GCC-6 and GCC-7 trees and will retire the GCC-6 tree once GCC-8 becomes stable (i.e. once 8.1.0 comes out in about April).

> For example, no LTS version of Ubuntu packages a compiler that's new enough to build U-Boot now:-(

I recommend crosstools-ng for situations like this… in fact, I recommend crosstools-ng for any setup.
Building a [target]-elf toolchain really doesn’t take long.

Best regards,
Philipp.