HI Zach, 

The BP (https://blueprints.launchpad.net/linaro-android/+spec/linaro-android-use-gcc4.6-with-o3) and Bug #822113 aim at improving android performance. I think we also need to balance the size and the performance improvement. I used the gcc benchmark tool to benchmark the performance with different configuration: -O3 for arm files only, -O3 for both arm files and thumb files and -fstrict-aliasing. The results can be found at https://wiki.linaro.org/ChaoYang/Sandbox/gccoptimization. Please note, the results are based on linaro_android_2.3.4 for panda and toolchain-4.6-1107.  I will benchmark linaro_android_2.3.5 and toolchain-4.6-1108 if necessary when they are stable enough.   

The image size increases significantly when -O3 is enabled for thumb files, however it does not look like performance has been improved as much as expected. Could you please let me know if you think it is worth building thumb files with -O3 regardless of size? Thanks.

Regards

--

Chao Yang
Android Platform Team
Linaro.org │ Open source software for ARM SoCs
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