The Linaro Toolchain Working Group is pleased to announce the release of
Linaro QEMU 2012.03.
Linaro QEMU 2012.03 is the latest monthly release of qemu-linaro. Based
off upstream (trunk) QEMU, it includes a number of ARM-focused bug fixes
and enhancements.
Highlights in this month's release:
- we now default to enabling 'reserve memory for guest' on 64 bit hosts
in linux-user-mode. This significantly reduces the chances of QEMU
being unable to satisfy a guest process mmap() request.
- Fix for a bug that was causing spurious failures of the glibc check
for "%n in a format string must be in a read-only area of memory"
when running in linux-user-mode.
- QEMU's built-in boot loader now supports passing a device tree blob
to the kernel: if you boot with -kernel mykernel (and optionally
-initrd myinitrd) you can now also use the new command line option
-dtb my.dtb to pass a device tree.
- This version includes an initial implementation of a model of the
Samsung Exynos4210 SoC, used by board models 'nuri' and 'smdkc210'
(thanks to Evgeny Voevodin, Maksim Kozlov, Igor Mitsyanko and
Dmitry Solodkiy from Samsung, who submitted this work to upstream
QEMU).
- This version includes an initial implementation of a model of the
Calxeda Highbank SoC, used by board model 'highbank' (thanks to Rob
Herring and Mark Langsdorf of Calxeda, who submitted this work to
upstream QEMU).
- various other minor bug fixes (detailed in the Changelog.LINARO).
Known issues:
- Graphics do not work for OMAP3 based models (beagle, overo)
with 11.10 Linaro images.
The source tarball is available at:
https://launchpad.net/qemu-linaro/+milestone/2012.03
More information on Linaro QEMU is available at:
https://launchpad.net/qemu-linaro
The GCC release tested up just fine. The branch is now open for commits.
The next release is Thursday the 12th of April. Note that this is the
week after Easter.
-- Michael
The Linaro Toolchain Working Group is pleased to announce the 2012.03
release of both Linaro GCC 4.6 and Linaro GCC 4.5.
Linaro GCC 4.6 2012.03 is the thirteenth release in the 4.6 series. Based
off the latest GCC 4.6.3 release, it contains a new scheduler pressure pass,
implements new instructions, and contains a number of bug fixes.
Interesting changes include:
* Updates to 4.6.3.
* Better performance by accounting for register pressure when
scheduling instructions.
* Support for the ARMv6 USAT/SSAT saturation instructions.
* Support for the VFP VCVT fixed to floating point conversion instruction.
Fixes:
* LP: #922474 Bug in __sync_lock_release with 64 bit primitives
* LP: #923397 Alignment attribute has no effect under certain conditions
* LP: #926855 [ARMhf] gcc produces assembler it can't compile
* LP: #936863 ICE in constprop.2 (ARM NEON related?)
* LP: #942307 'asm' operand requires impossible reload
* LP: #952565 Not compliant with the ABI for multi-register NEON intrinsics
Linaro GCC 4.5 2012.03 is the nineteenth release in the 4.5 series. Based
off the latest GCC 4.5.3+svn184976 release, this is a maintenance only
update.
Interesting changes include:
* Updates to 4.5.3+svn184976.
The source tarballs are available from:
https://launchpad.net/gcc-linaro/+milestone/4.6-2012.03https://launchpad.net/gcc-linaro/+milestone/4.5-2012.03
Downloads are available from the Linaro GCC page on Launchpad:
https://launchpad.net/gcc-linaro
More information on the features and issues are available from the
release page:
https://launchpad.net/gcc-linaro/4.6/4.6-2012.03
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(a)linaro.org
-- Michael
EEMBC have announced AndEBench, a mixed native/Java benchmark for
Android. It's available on the Market.
I don't know much more. It seems to be CPU bound and the test names
sound a bit like CoreMark. The source is available for license and
might be worth the Android guys looking into.
The awesome thing is they used the 2012.01 Linaro Binary toolchain
release to build the native parts - see the compiler version string in
the log :)
-- Michael
Hi,
GDB for Android:
* Wrote first draft of the GDB for Android card.
* Found out that there actually is a libthread_db.so in /system/lib
and was able to compile (after a small hack) an FSF gdbserver 7.3
which uses the libthread_db.so from Android and correctly shows
all threads in the process. So the libthread_db.so from Android
actually works, still have to learn why they don't use it.
* Tried to compile a native GDB which uses libthread_db.so but no
luck so far. There are many differences in bionic's header files
which upset libiberty and gnulib which are not easy to work around.
--
[]'s
Thiago Jung Bauermann
Linaro Toolchain Working Group
We now do a SPEC ref run when benchmarking. I've updated the
linaro-toolchain-benchmarks scripts to handle the changes and spawned
some historical builds to do comparisons. All earlier builds have
been archived to prevent confusion.
The human readable summary is now also included in the results. See:
http://ex.seabright.co.nz/benchmarks/gcc-linaro-4.6-2012.02/logs/armv7l-nat…
for an example.
Half an hour to build, 26 hours to run. Not too bad.
-- Michael
Here's brief notes on running different benchmark variants across the
auto builders. Asa, could you pull these plus your notes into a wiki
page?
Spawn a job:
http://ex.seabright.co.nz/helpers/scheduler/spawn
Merge requests are automatically built. Otherwise, drop arbitrary
tarballs into cbuild@orion:~/snapshots and spawn <tarball name minus
extension>. For example, scp gcc-4.6.3.tar.gz
cbuild@orion:~/snapshots; spawn gcc-4.6.3 into a9-builder.
Jobs:
* gcc-version - build and test GCC
* benchmarks-gcc-version - run coremark, denbench, eembc against the
already built version
* benchmarks-spec2000-gcc-version - run spec2000
Queues:
* a9-builders: anything that can naive build a A9 compiler
* a9-ref: reference A9 boards
* a8-ref: reference A8 boards
Variables:
* BENCHMARKS = list, such as coremark spec2000 pybench - run these
benchmarks instead of the defaults
Variants:
* By default we build o3-neon
* See http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~linaro-toolchain-dev/cbuild/trunk/view/head:/l…
for all names
* Spawn a job with VARIANT_SRC = all and VARIANT_LIST = glob-pattern
Examples:
* VARIANT_LIST = o3-neon o3-vfpv3 (compare NEON with VFPv3D32)
* VARIANT_LIST = o3-neon-cortexa8 o3-neon-cortexa9 (compare
-mtune=cortexa8 vs -mtune=cortexa9(
* VARIANT_LIST = o3-neon-novect o3-neon (compare with/without the vectoriser)
-- Michael
I'd like to announce a change in how the Linaro Toolchain group notify
about our monthly releases. In the past we've sent one email per
product to the linaro-announce list. From this week forward a summary
of all products will be included in the main, end of month
announcement instead.
We'll continue to send a per product emails to the linaro-toolchain
list when the mid-month release is available. If you'd like to get
things two weeks early, please subscribe[1]. You can filter on the
word '[ANNOUNCE]' to filter out the development chatter. A RSS feed
is also available[2].
-- Michael
[1] http://lists.linaro.org/mailman/listinfo/linaro-toolchain
[2] http://feeds.launchpad.net/linaro-toolchain/announcements.atom
All,
I need to supply a Linaro toolchain "aligned" (same source code)
bare-metal compiler to a group doing benchmarking on A15.
First off my assumption is that we will write our own boot and semi
hosting code. (semi-hosting for TI emulators/simulators is different
than ARM RDI semi-hosting.)
I was planning on looking at the two toolchains here[1] and here [2]:
[1] https://launchpad.net/linaro-toolchain-binaries
[2] https://launchpad.net/gcc-arm-embedded
I was then going to build a hybrid that was newlib based but appropriate
for armv7-a (instead of cortext-m3) and maybe even -mtune'ed for A15.
However looking at the gcc-arm-embedded release more[3] I see that it
supports ARMv7-R. It supports both thumb and non-thumb modes, both
softfp and hardfp ABIs.
What would I really gain by building my own? For app code the user
should be able to add -mtune=cortex-a15 and still be compatible with the
pre-built R4/R5 libraries. The only performance difference should be in
the library code and that should be only pipeline tuning if I understand
the difference between armv7-a and armv7-r correctly.
Am I missing something? Should I build my hybrid anyway?
[1] https://launchpadlibrarian.net/88152755/readme.txt
[BTW: has the below project been obsoleted by the gcc-arm-embedded one?
Perhaps gcc-arm-embedded should be referenced in the description of
the page below.
https://launchpad.net/linaro-toolchain-unsupported ]
Thanks,
Bill
Committed the 4.6.3 merge to Linaro GCC 4.6.
Merged from FSF 4.5 to Linaro GCC 4.5.
Thought about how to do register-class allocation for NEON v. core
registers case. Discussed the problem at the GCC performance meeting.
Lots of interesting discussion was had. I have some interesting
experiments to do, but the first step needs to be to get my 64-bit
operator patch to work correctly.
Tried to track down the problems in my NEON-immediates patch. The
problem is that it's putting constants in different pools in stage 3 to
what it does in stage 2. Presumably this is something to do with the
pool-offset attributes in the instruction patterns? My patch has caused
it to switch from using 'fldd' to using 'vmov' in some cases (the
instructions are aliases, but it's indicative of a different machine
description pattern in the compiler), but I don't know why the change
would be different between the different bootstrap stages? I made some
alterations to switch it back to `fldd` when it wasn't supposed to
change, but bootstrap still fails. More investigation required...again.
Rewrote the NEON one's-complement patch and posted it upstream.
Tracked down the cause of the bootstrap failures in my NEON 64-bit
shifts patch: out-of-range shift amounts were not handled leading to
ICEs. Reworked the constant shift handling cases, and resumbitted the
patch for testing. It's failed again. A job for next week.
