binutils patch and versions of toolchain

HI,

I want to upgrade my toolchain.
In the past I compiled binutils 2.20.1 patched with 
http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/cvsweb.cgi/ports/devel/avr-binutils/files/patch-newdevices 
as explained here: 
http://www.nongnu.org/avr-libc/user-manual/install_tools.html

these patches are 14 months old and are still forversion 2.20.1.
I downloaded binutils 2.23.1. I have found that many patches are already 
in the source, while other are not, such as, for example, size.c or 
coff-avr.c.
I wonder which of these patches to apply.


What do you think of a toolchain consists of gcc 4.7.2, binutils 2.23.1, 
avr-libc 1.8.0? There are known issue like buggy generated code or 
increase of code size?

best regards


max