The Linaro Toolchain Working Group is pleased to announce the release of both Linaro GCC 4.5 and Linaro GCC 4.6.

Linaro GCC 4.5 2011.05 is the tenth release in the 4.5 series. Based off the latest GCC 4.5.3+svn173417, it adds new optimisations, much improved support for strided load/stores, and fixes for many of the issues found in the last month.

Interesting changes in 4.5 include: * Updates to 4.5.3+r173417 * Performance improvements in NEON strided loads and stores * Performance improvements targeted at EEMBC CoreMark * Precompiled header support on recent Linux kernels

Fixes: * LP: #660156: Heap randomisation causes PCH testsuite failures * LP: #784375: vset_lane_u8 intrinsic generates wrong lane number * LP: #759409: Profiled bootstrap fails in FSF GCC 4.5 * LP: #723086: Test regressions in the Fortran test suite

The strided load/store improvements allow both NEON intrinsics and the vectoriser to efficiently access values that occur at every n'th address, such as all of the red values in a RGB image or all of the left channel samples in a interleaved audio array. Previous versions of GCC would unpack the values onto the stack instead of using the registers directly.

The CoreMark improvements improve the code generation for the hot functions in benchmark. This release is now on par with Linaro GCC 4.4 and significantly ahead of other FSF or Linaro 4.5 based compilers. This fixes the long-standing problems of ARMv5 being faster than ARMv7 and 4.4 based compilers being faster than 4.5 based ones.

Linaro GCC 4.6 is the third release in the 4.6 series. Based off the latest GCC 4.6.0+svn173480, it adds new optimisations, vectoriser improvements, and continues with the merge of many ARM-focused changes.

Interesting changes include: * Updates to 4.6.0+r173417 * Brings forward more of the performance improvements from Linaro GCC 4.5 * Adds support for swing-modulo scheduling * Fixes precompiled header support on recent Linux kernels * Changes the default NEON vector size to quads * Adds auto-detection of the best vector size * Adds vectorisation improvements due to better if-conversion

Fixes: * LP: #714921: Uses an unreasonable amount of memory to compile QEMU on armel * LP: #723086: Test regressions in the Fortran test suite

The source tarball is available from: https://launchpad.net/gcc-linaro/+milestone/4.5-2011.05-0 https://launchpad.net/gcc-linaro/+milestone/4.6-2011.05-0

Downloads are available from the Linaro GCC page on Launchpad: https://launchpad.net/gcc-linaro

Mailing list: http://lists.linaro.org/mailman/listinfo/linaro-toolchain

Bugs: https://bugs.launchpad.net/gcc-linaro/

Questions? https://ask.linaro.org/

Interested in commercial support? inquire at support@linaro.org

-- Michael