GCC 4.1.2 Issue. New toolchain soon?

I've noticed many seemingly unnecessary masks of unsigned chars with FF as well. I don't think this has changed with the new 4.7.3 version. dsl is this just a small performance penalty or were there other concerns about this that made you decide you "couldn't mark things as 'volatile'"?

Another problem I noticed that I don't know if any of these patches address, is when I use the I/O byte and short built-ins, I get code like this:

addi    r17,r2,2
ldbuio  r3,0(r17)

Which I would think could simply be:

ldbuio  r3,2(r2)

Which it doesn't have a problem generating for the 4-byte instruction:

ldwio   r3,4(r2)

Jeff, any word on getting these patches integrated? And what is the best way to report things like this?