Re: Migration to Debian Bookworm and compiler updates for KernelCI

On 12.03.24 17:13, Chris Paterson wrote:
> + CIP people 
> (sorry for the delay)
> 
>> From: Denys Fedoryshchenko <[email protected]>
>> Sent: Thursday, March 7, 2024 11:02 AM
>>
>> Hello,
>>
>> I'm reaching out on behalf of the KernelCI project team to discuss our
>> current compiler setup and planned migration to Debian Bookworm.
>>
>> As you may know, our compiler images are currently based on Debian
>> Bullseye, which is approaching its end of life in July 2024. We have
>> been testing using gcc-10, which has presented us with some recent
>> challenges, notably a significant bug that results in false positive
>> compilation errors (specifically, the -Werror memcpy issue in
>> security.c). This situation has prompted us to consider an urgent
>> migration to Debian Bookworm. Additionally, the migration is
>> necessitated by our requirement to upgrade to a newer Python version to
>> support KernelCI v2 development efforts.
>>
>> However, before we proceed, we have a couple of pending questions that
>> we hope to get clarity on:
>>
>> 1) We've noticed that the minimal available version of clang on
>> https://apt.llvm.org/bookworm/dists/ is 15, whereas our current minimal
>> requirement for the Linux kernel compilation is clang-13.0.1
>> (https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/next/process/changes.html). How
>> critical is it to continue providing compile tests for clang-13 (and
>> potentially clang-14)? This information would be vital for us in
>> planning our compiler support strategy moving forward.
>>
>> 2) We are also considering migrating to gcc-12 and would like to
>> inquire if the CIP (Civil Infrastructure Platform) could provide their
>> endorsement for this move. Should there be any reservations about
>> transitioning to gcc-12, we would greatly appreciate development
>> support in building gcc-10 for Bookworm. In the interim, we would like
>> to inquire if it's acceptable to continue using our current gcc-10
>> images based on Bullseye until such a migration is feasible.
> 
> Jan, Iwamatsu-san, Arisu-san,
> Do you have any comments here?
> 

My 2 cents: I'm not aware of compilation issues of our 4.4..6.1-cip
kernels with gcc-12 from bookworm. In different projects than CIP (e.g.
xenomai-images), we are also using bookworm as basis to build down to
4.4-cip, and that was not causing problems so far.

Jan

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