Gnutools: consideration for upgrade to GCC 4.6
Ilija Kocho <[email protected]> Fri, 13 Jan 2012 18:00:53 +0100
| Newsgroups | gmane.os.ecos.devel |
|---|---|
| Message-ID | <[email protected]> |
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