On 02/16/2018 01:46 PM, John Crispin wrote: > Hi, > > whats on the critical todo list for the upcoming release ? i still have > a few minor things that I'll be adding shortly, apart from that I am > currently not aware of any huge problems. the release will be a mix > between 4.9 and 4.14 afaik !?
I think the kernel situation is ok now and not blocking a release, we will have a mixed kernel 4.9 and 4.14 release. All important targets are on one of these two kernel versions by now. The patches for the gemini target will probably get included soon. Some targets will probably be updated from 4.9 to 4.14, but this is not blocking. What do we want to do with GCC 5.5 versus 7.3? GCC 5.5 is getting old, we have multiple problems with it, the big blocker for GCC 7 was just fixed upstream and we backported that fix. see: http://git.openwrt.org/25aaff9100065dba881be71b9dcab1e9cc8a7b5f The x86 and x86_64 architectures are already on GCC 7.3, the ARC architecture uses their own GCC fork based on version 7.X all other architectures are on GCC 5.5. We have the following problems with GCC 5.5: * U-Boot depends on GCC 6 or higher since version 2018.01 on ARM and ARM64 * GCC 5 and older are producing too big binaries, e.g. the SPL on the Allwinner A64 (sunxi, ARM64) is getting too big starting with U-Boot 2017.09 and does not fit into the SRAM any more, GCC 7 solves this problem. * busybox on the gemini target updated to kernel 4.14 does not work correctly. * GCC 5.5 only has out of tree fixes for Spectre, GCC 7.3 already has the retpoline fixes against Spectre included As the x86 target use GCC 7.3 now, there are multiple pull requests fixing some build problems in some packages with GCC 7. I am not aware of any regressions in GCC 7 compared to GCC 5. Changing the default compiler from GCC 5 to GCC 7 is no big problem, the problems are the regressions we are not aware of by now, if we change the default compiler for all architectures to GCC 7 we should probably wait 4 weeks before doing an RC release to be sure most of the runtime problems with GCC 7 are found. If we do the switch to GCC 7 I think we should also change binutils from 2.28 to 2.28.1 or 2.29.1. I found this problem with binutils 2.28 which was already fixed in 2.28.1: https://git.openwrt.org/bcd17ce9a3308accc30d99f4dd43f2062bb3fabc The minor versions contains more bugfixes. There is also a pull request for busybox 2.28.1 at github, this will probably also introduce some more regressions, so I am not sure if we should take it before or after the release. https://github.com/openwrt/openwrt/pull/733 I do not have a real opinion on this and I am probably the wrong person to judge this. I do not know what the status of the software fast path patches are, but they are looking interesting. My proposal would be to update all targets to GCC 7.3 and also use binutils 2.29.1 and musl 1.1.19. This change would be done as soon as possible and then we branch of end of March or beginning of April for 18.X and do a RC1 one week after creating the branch. Hauke _______________________________________________ Lede-dev mailing list Lede-dev@lists.infradead.org http://lists.infradead.org/mailman/listinfo/lede-dev
