[ACTIVITY] 28th February - 5th March

[Andrew Stubbs]

Committed Kazu's VFP testcases patch upstream.

Merged the latest from upstream GCC 4.6.

Merged all the outstanding launchpad merge requests against both GCC 4.5 
and 4.6.

Spun the 4.5-2011.03-0 and 4.6-2011.03-0 releases. Passed the tarballs 
to Michael H for final testing.

Brought the patch tracker up to date w.r.t. to new merges.

Posted one of Dan's patches upstream for review.

Decided to drop Julian's A8 alignment patch completely. I had previously 
discovered it provided no measurable benefit on A8, and now I've found 
the same for A9 (Pandaboard). There's no real improvement for any 
combination of -falign-* options in EEMBC.

Bernd's "Discourage NEON on A8" patch also doesn't show any value in the 
benchmark results, but I think I've forward ported it wrong, because it 
should at least change the binary size, and it doesn't. I need to look 
into this further.

I also decided I don't know enough about ARMv7, so I spent some time 
reading a few chapters from the ARM A.R.M.



----
Upstream patched requiring review:
* Thumb2 constants:
   http://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc-patches/2010-12/msg00652.html
* ARM EABI half-precision functions
   http://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc-patches/2011-02/msg00874.html
* ARM Thumb2 Spill Likely tweak
   http://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc-patches/2011-02/msg00880.html
* NEON scheduling patch
   http://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc-patches/2011-02/msg01431.html
* RVCT Interoperability patch
   http://www.mail-archive.com/gcc-patches@gcc.gnu.org/msg00059.html