I vaguely recall that when I was building LFS some time in the past, gcc 2.95 was recommended over the 3.x series for some reason. So I looked it up and found a

I vaguely recall that when I was building LFS some time in the past, gcc 2.95 was recommended over the 3.x series for some reason. So I looked it up and found a line about it in an old version of the book: > This is an older release of GCC which we are going to install for the purpose of compiling the Linux kernel in Chapter 8. This version is recommended by the kernel developers when you need absolute stability. Later versions of GCC have not received as much testing for Linux kernel compilation. Using a later version is likely to work, however, we recommend adhering to the kernel developer's advice and using the version here to compile your kernel. https://www.linuxfromscratch.org/museum/lfs-museum/5.0/LFS-BOOK-5.0-HTML/chapter06/gcc-2953.html https://www.linuxfromscratch.org/museum/lfs-museum/5.0/LFS-B... I wish I had a better reference. The bit about "compile this version of Linux as if you were a compiler at the time which accepted this broken code in this way" made me think of that.