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  1. Sep 02, 2021
  2. Apr 24, 2021
    • Masahiro Yamada's avatar
      kbuild: check the minimum assembler version in Kconfig · ba64beb1
      Masahiro Yamada authored
      Documentation/process/changes.rst defines the minimum assembler version
      (binutils version), but we have never checked it in the build time.
      
      Kbuild never invokes 'as' directly because all assembly files in the
      kernel tree are *.S, hence must be preprocessed. I do not expect
      raw assembly source files (*.s) would be added to the kernel tree.
      
      Therefore, we always use $(CC) as the assembler driver, and commit
      aa824e0c ("kbuild: remove AS variable") removed 'AS'. However,
      we are still interested in the version of the assembler acting behind.
      
      As usual, the --version option prints the version string.
      
        $ as --version | head -n 1
        GNU assembler (GNU Binutils for Ubuntu) 2.35.1
      
      But, we do not have $(AS). So, we can add the -Wa prefix so that
      $(CC) passes --version down to the backing assembler.
      
        $ gcc -Wa,--version | head -n 1
        gcc: fatal error: no input files
        compilation terminated.
      
      OK, we need to input something to satisfy gcc.
      
        $ gcc -Wa,--version -c -x assembler /dev/null -o /dev/null | head -n 1
        GNU assembler (GNU Binutils for Ubuntu) 2.35.1
      
      The combination of Clang and GNU assembler works in the same way:
      
        $ clang -no-integrated-as -Wa,--version -c -x assembler /dev/null -o /dev/null | head -n 1
        GNU assembler (GNU Binutils for Ubuntu) 2.35.1
      
      Clang with the integrated assembler fails like this:
      
        $ clang -integrated-as -Wa,--version -c -x assembler /dev/null -o /dev/null | head -n 1
        clang: error: unsupported argument '--version' to option 'Wa,'
      
      For the last case, checking the error message is fragile. If the
      proposal for -Wa,--version support [1] is accepted, this may not be
      even an error in the future.
      
      One easy way is to check if -integrated-as is present in the passed
      arguments. We did not pass -integrated-as to CLANG_FLAGS before, but
      we can make it explicit.
      
      Nathan pointed out -integrated-as is the default for all of the
      architectures/targets that the kernel cares about, but it goes
      along with "explicit is better than implicit" policy. [2]
      
      With all this in my mind, I implemented scripts/as-version.sh to
      check the assembler version in Kconfig time.
      
        $ scripts/as-version.sh gcc
        GNU 23501
        $ scripts/as-version.sh clang -no-integrated-as
        GNU 23501
        $ scripts/as-version.sh clang -integrated-as
        LLVM 0
      
      [1]: https://github.com/ClangBuiltLinux/linux/issues/1320
      [2]: https://lore.kernel.org/linux-kbuild/20210307044253.v3h47ucq6ng25iay@archlinux-ax161/
      
      
      
      Signed-off-by: default avatarMasahiro Yamada <masahiroy@kernel.org>
      Reviewed-by: default avatarNathan Chancellor <nathan@kernel.org>
      ba64beb1
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