I was wondering if anyone has tried to upgrade the default gcc installed under 5F27?

I have a Intel Quad Dual Core and gcc recognizes the CPU as a K8 processor. Everything that I have compiled works fine. I would like to take advantage of the processor optimizations from a newer version of gcc.

Dwaine

Nothing related to normal operations cares about the version of gcc installed.

If you don't have a need to build compatible kernel modules using apt-get may be the easiest path (subject to the usual caveats for using apt-get safely ). You can also build the latest gcc from source and install it in an alternate location and prepending that to your PATH. (I do this on development systems at work all the time while bringing up new architectures or testing with new compiler versions). This later approach has the advantage of leaving the system compiler alone.

However I think that you're laboring under a couple of misconceptions.

1) The CPU specific speedups may not be significant. For example Cecil dropped separate i386 and i686 versions because the performance difference was barely measurable. You may get a boost from new "multimedia instructions" but the K8 should already include most of those.

2) If you're expecting to be able to compile in 64 bit mode and run the binaries under R5F27 you'll be seriously disappointed. Running 64 bit binaries requires a 64 bit kernel and a full set of 64 bit libraries. OBTW - Applications compiled for 64 bit operation are often _slower_ than the equivalent 32 bit version since you often need to get twice as much stuff from memory or disk which tend to be the real system bottlenecks anyway.

I updated the gcc and related libraries to v4.2.3 that was in the unstable branch. It worked fine with a lot of dependencies updates.

So now I have to recompile the kernel with 4.2.3 so I can get some modules loaded like the tree from v4l/dvb tree and the nvidia driver.

I have not really any luck with recompiling the 2.6.8-chw-18 kernel sources. It keeps getting compiling errors. Doing the following....

cd /usr/src/linux-source-2.6.18-chw-13
cp /boot/config-2.6.18-chw-13 .config
make-k pkg kernel_image

The make listed has never worked for me when recompiling the kernel. It always fails on the pkg and the name of the kernel file. Complaining about no make rules for both pkg and kernel_image. The closest I have gotten was a complete compile but no bzImage created because of errors.

Definitely not for the faint hearted. If I could just get the kernel to compile then I would be done.

Compiling the kernel was always a pain, but I could get it going before with 4.1.2.

Hopefully I can figure out the /drivers/video/fbmon.o compile failure.

Dwaine


Dwaine

I fixed the problem with the kernel compile. I had to reinstall the kernel sources again????

Everything is running mint again... Everything compiles ok with 4.2.3 gcc.