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
