On Fri, Jan 19, 2018 at 05:06:25PM -0500, Mark H Weaver wrote:
> ludo@gnu.org (Ludovic Courtès) writes:
> > Leo Famulari <leo@famulari.name> skribis:
> >> Something we can do very easily, even on the master branch, is to build
> >> specific packages with GCC 7, assuming the Retpoline technique would be
> >> effective in that context.
> >
> > Yes, I see Alex submitted a patch already.
> 
> There's now a GCC 7.3 release candidate that apparently contains the
> necessary compiler support to allow linux-libre-4.14.14 to use the
> retpoline technique internally.
> 
>   https://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc/2018-01/msg00115.html
> 
> They hope to release GCC 7.3 on January 24th.  It would be good to
> promptly add GCC 7.3 to Guix when its released, and to start using it to
> build linux-libre-4.14 on selected systems: x86_64 and possibly aarch64.
> 
> I'd prefer to continue using our default compiler to build linux-libre
> on systems where GCC 7.3 is not known to help with this issue.

Thanks for looking into this, Mark. Your plan sounds good to me.