The previous bump to 4.4 was done in:

  commit 24241c23
  Author: Daniel P. Berrange <berrange@redhat.com>
  Date:   Wed Jul 5 10:35:32 2017 +0100

    Require use of GCC 4.4 or CLang compilers

with 4.4 picked due to RHEL-6. Since we dropped RHEL-6, the
next oldest distro is RHEL-7 (4.8.5), and thus we pick 4.8
as the new min.
Reviewed-by: NAndrea Bolognani <abologna@redhat.com>
Signed-off-by: NDaniel P. Berrangé <berrange@redhat.com>