can you get a better compiler back ported?

Compiler isn't a big deal. libgcc, libstdc++ etc suddenly become a nightmare

can those be linked statically? Or does that bugger up partially native assemblies?

I'd prefer to avoid writing more build logic for a single distro-arch combination, it's hard enough keeping on top of the configurations I have.

Fair. So that implies libgcc, libstdc++ etc backports if you want 14.04 to be useful.

yeah, which is a big area of responsibiliy to take on a user's system

True, though if it's the only choice for getting it running, then that's what you have to go for. four years ago is quite early in arm64 land, I'm surprised that anyone would still be running that :(

Random example: if you want something resembling maintenance parity the same between Tegra X1 and K1 systems (i.e. same compiler versions, etc), the most recent L4T for K1 is based on 14.04.

Aaah because Nvidia are basically not on the "bring stuff forward or else it's worthless" train :( OOI isn't K1 pretty much entirely supported upstream these days?

I don't like messing with reflashing uboot-based systems. It only ever fills me with regret.