This work started with bugs #94325 #100689 #106222 #149292 #149649 and the overlay on http://overlays.gentoo.org/dev/kevquinn. By Kevin K. Quinn, Peter S. Mazinger, Natanael Copa, Alexander Gabert, Solar, PaX Team, SpanKY and mentor. The work stalled. Some threads on the Gentoo forum started to do their own fixes to get it working. Xake started the thread where most of the new work is done: "How long until hardened and toolchain will produce a hardened gcc4?" http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-668885.html. I joined the thread and started to code. We started with the pieworld code from kevquinn's overlay. The PIE and minispecs part hit the tree later on. With GCC 4.4.0 I was willing to do some code cleanup, use built-in specs and add it as --enable-esp in the configure command line. On GCC 4.8.0 we use DRIVER_SELF_SPECS for the specs. Thank you all: Kevin K. Quinn, Peter S. Mazinger, Natanael Copa, Alexander Gabert, Solar, PaX Team, SpanKY, Xake, Dwokfur, KernelOfTruth, SteveL, nixnut, Hopeless, forsaken1, XioXous, obrut<-, mv, qjim, Tommy[D], Genewb, radegand, unk, neuron, alexxy, hellboi64, likewhoa, g0rg0n, costel78, polsas, 7v5w7go9ub0o, uberpinguin, Naib, cilly, bonsaikitten, kerframil, agaffney, Gordon Malm, blueness, Matthias Klose, Kees Cook, mentor, Anarchy, devurandom and everyone else for helping to test, suggestions, fixes and anything else we have missed. /2013-03-31 Magnus Grenberg (Zorry)