Gnutools: consideration for upgrade to GCC 4.6

[Frank Pagliughi]

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