[RFC,0/1] kbuild: enable overriding the compiler using the environment

Message

Guillaume Tucker Aug. 8, 2019, 9:06 p.m. UTC

When building with clang and there is no gcc available, running
merge_config.sh fails without this fix because it can't build
scripts/basic/fixdep with HOSTCC hard-coded to be gcc in the top-level
Makefile.  This was discovered while trying to build big-endian arm64
kernels with clang for kernelci.org in a Docker container with only clang
as a host compiler.

While this fix seems like a very obvious thing to do, it's equally
surprising that it hasn't been done before.  This is why I'm sending this
as an RFC; there may be a very good reason why the compiler variables
still need to be hard-coded with gcc in the top-level Makefile.

Guillaume Tucker (1):
  kbuild: enable overriding the compiler using the environment

 Makefile | 6 +++---
 1 file changed, 3 insertions(+), 3 deletions(-)

--
2.20.1

Comments

Mark Brown Aug. 8, 2019, 10:17 p.m. UTC | #1

On Thu, Aug 08, 2019 at 11:06:51PM +0200, Guillaume Tucker wrote:

> While this fix seems like a very obvious thing to do, it's equally
> surprising that it hasn't been done before.  This is why I'm sending this
> as an RFC; there may be a very good reason why the compiler variables
> still need to be hard-coded with gcc in the top-level Makefile.

Probably the few people building kernels who didn't have GCC installed
and ran into this just went and installed it when they saw the error.