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Re: Gnutools: consideration for upgrade to GCC 4.6


On 01/13/2012 12:00 PM, Ilija Kocho wrote:
Hi colleagues

Our GCC 4.3.2 is ageing and perhaps we should consider an upgrade.
My motive is it's lacking of support for Cortex-M4 SIMD (aka DSP) and FPU instructions, but I think that other architectures shall gain from newer compiler too. I have made some signal processing tests with GCC 4.6.2 against current eCos compiler and they show performance gain even with Cortex-M3 setting, though moderate. Performance is considerable when Cortex-M4 setting is selected and is tremendous, as expected, when SIMD are used. Recently introduced Cortex-M products with FPU (Kinetis K70, K61, STM32F4) will further emphasise the benefit.


Another reason, maybe not so important, is that GCC 4.3 is not officially supported any more.

Regarding this, I state my wish that we move to the latest stable GCC release, that is at present rel. 4.6.2, accompanied with respective binutils. I have tested binutils 2.21 but in meantime 2.22 has been released. Of course, the list wouldn't be complete without the latest GDB.

Looking forward for your comments.
Ilija

I'm all for it. I've been using 4.6.2 for the last few months for ARM (EABI, of course) and i386. The 4.3 compilers wouldn't compile some of the libraries that I use and I didn't want to back port them to an old compiler. I used binutils 2.21.1.

So far I've been very happy, but I was mostly concerned with language features. The additional Cortex support sells it, though. I'm just starting to start shopping around for a Cortex-M3 for my next project.

Frank


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