GCC for kernel hackers
A new Tim Jones tutorial overviews GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) extensions to ANSI C that may be of special interest to Linux kernel and driver developers. Meanwhile, the GCC development team is readying a new 4.4.0 release with stricter preprocessor checks, among other new features.
The GCC project appears to be on the cusp of releasing 4.4.0, with only regression fixes and documentation updates being accepted, according to Martin Michlmayr, former Debian project leader. Michlmayr reports that he compiled Debian with a 4.4 pre-release, finding 220 errors, most easily fixed. "The majority of GCC 4.4 build errors are missing #include statements. There are also about 20 build errors because of improved preprocessor checks," Michlmayr wrote.
Meanwhile, IBM DeveloperWorks has published another in its series of tutorials on GCC 4. Entitled, "GCC hacks in the Linux kernel," it was written by Tim Jones, who also recently surveyed new features in GCC 4.0 in and earlier article.
