The race to GCC 3

[bconway at alum.wpi.edu (Brian J.Conway)]

>   One word of caution that Red Hat will inevitably (and, IMNSHO,
> unjustifiably) get a lot flak for.  Binary only modules *will* have
> problems if they are not recompiled with gcc 3.x.  (This most
> *definitely* includes the Lucent winmodem drivers.) The new modutils
> will pick up on this and refuse to load the module.  For those who
> distribute binary only modules, the responsibility falls squarely on
> them, not Red Hat, or any other Linux distributor, to make things work
> with the new kernel/compiler.  I'll dig up what Alan Cox posted to some
> of the public Red Hat mailing lists, if anyone is interested, but I
> won't have access to email again until Sunday, so I won't get to it
> until then.

That is definitely not Red Hat's fault in any way.  No less than once a
day on a Mandrake forum I see someone that can't load the nVidia module
after unknowingly compiling it with GCC 3.1 on Mandrake 8.2 (the generic
kernel is compiled with GCC 2.96).  Without knowing too much about
compiler internals, I just assumed that's the way things worked.  I would
imagine I'd have just as much trouble loading modules compiled with a
different GCC for my dxr3 card, and that it's not a binary-only issue
(just a binary issue, I would think).  Are you supposed to be able to load
modules compiled by a different GCC?  I've never been able to.

Brian J. Conway
bconway at alum.wpi.edu

"Any man who can drive safely while kissing a pretty girl
is simply not giving the kiss the attention it deserves."
     - Albert Einstein