How does the GCC deprecation affect binutils?

[Andrew Walbran]

Hello,

According to https://android.googlesource.com/platform/prebuilts/clang/host/linux-x86/+/master/GCC_4_9_DEPRECATION.md, Android's prebuilt GCC is being deprecated in favour of Clang. How does this affect other binaries under https://android.googlesource.com/platform/prebuilts/gcc/linux-x86/aarch64/aarch64-linux-android-4.9/, e.g. the GNU assembler? As far as I can tell the kernel build still calls out to this because the kernel makefile passes -no-integrated-as to Clang. Will the entire directory of prebuilts be removed in January, or only the gcc binary while the rest continue to be supported?

(For context, I'm trying to make the Hafnium build self-contained, and it currently uses the system 'as' for building our Linux kernel module. I'd like to use a prebuilt instead, and using the Android-maintained prebuilt would be good if possible, as we use the Android prebuilt of Clang already.)