Gnutools: consideration for upgrade to GCC 4.6

[Ilija Kocho]

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