Re: Gnutools: consideration for upgrade to GCC 4.6

On 13.01.2012 20:09, Frank Pagliughi wrote:
> 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.

I was using 2.21.1, but toady I tried 2.22. It works out of box, no 
patching.

>
> 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.

If you are happy with ARM7TDMI you'll be happier with Cortex-M

Ilija