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Does anyone know if they have incorporated my patches (on the wiki) for 'small data' accesses?
I wrote them for gcc 3.4, but they applied to the gcc 4.1 version as well (the only changes I saw between 3.4 and 4.1 were regressions!).
gcc 4.1 certainly made a worse job (than 3.4) of compiling my code - although I didn't spend any time trying to work out why.
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1) Le "they" -- c'est moi. At least, I was hired a few months back as gcc maintainer and liaison to Mentor/CodeSourcery, who do the heavy lifting. (As you may have detected, nios2 toolchain maintainance has been minimal since gcc 4.1.2. We're intending and expecting to do a lot better going forward, starting with the big jump to gcc 4.7.3.)
2) Ghodz you're good! How did you work out all of those?? :-) (If you have any advice/pointers for learning gcc .md stuff I'm all ears. I have a reasonable compiler background -- e.g., I maintain the Mythryl compiler for fun -- but I'm new to gcc+binutils, which have a whole little jargon/world of their own.)
3) I don't see any evidence that your patches have been applied per set, but patches 1,7,8,11,12 have been re-invented. (I managed to find 11,12 on my own, whee.)
4) I'm going to point the Mentor/CodeSourcery folx to your remaining patches. They've re-invented five of them the hard way, they'd probably prefer to do the remaining ones the easy way. :-)
5) My/our informal experience to date is that gcc 4.7.3 generates slightly but significantly better code than gcc 4.1.2, as one might expect and hope. Very roughly 5% smaller, for example, with of course significant variation around the mean. We've had a few teething problems with Nios2 custom instruction generation, but otherwise the new toolchain seems pleasingly solid.
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