[avr-gcc-list] Toolchain developers: State of GCC HEAD

[Weddington, Eric]

Hi All,

GCC HEAD/4.4 has been in stage 1 for a while now. Recently, they announced that 
they will be entering stage 2 after August 31. Stage 2 only allows bug fixes, 
no new features. So many GCC developers are now in the final stages of adding 
various new features to GCC.

In the last 24 hours, a new Integrated Register Allocator (IRA) has been merged 
to the GCC trunk. Andy Hutchinson got the new IRA working for the AVR port.

Before the IRA merge, I was seeing 75 test failures from the GCC Regression 
Test Suite. Several days ago, I was seeing around 57 test failures. After the 
IRA merge, I am now seeing 233 test failures. After this email I will be going 
through those failures and making sure that they get reported in the GCC Bug 
List.

Any help would be greatly appreciated in getting these bugs resolved for the 
AVR port. If these bugs do not get resolved in a timely manner, we may very 
well have a situation where GCC 4.4.0 is *worse* for the AVR port, than it is 
for version 4.3.x. This would certainly put a damper on future releases of 
toolchain distributions, with new device support, and new features.

Note that stage 1 is not over yet. There are other major features that are also 
being added in before the close of stage 1. The test failure count may still go 
higher over the next few days.

Thanks,
Eric Weddington