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Replying to and
It was used to build the Pixel 2 kernel too. It has the best support for building it on arm64, which is also the architecture with the most focus on Linux kernel hardening. A lot of the hardening is done by ARM compared to x86 where Intel has barely any involvement in most of it.
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Replying to and
Google got tired of dealing with GCC and never bothered porting MSan, CFI or SafeStack to it. The code and development / contribution process for the GNU toolchain is awful. Google froze GCC at 4.9 permanently which made migrating to Clang more urgent and GCC itself is purged.
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Replying to and
ChromeOS has moved to Clang as the compiler for userspace and more recently the kernel too. Not really surprising since it's still Google, and they share a lot of the work between them, especially since ChromeOS includes Android's kernel changes and bundles it in a container.
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