Re: Gnutools: consideration for upgrade to GCC 4.6

[Alex Schuilenburg <alexs at ecoscentric dot com>]

Hi Ilija

On 2012-01-25 20:59, Ilija Kocho wrote:
> Hi Alex
>
> I wish to thank eCosCentric for supporting eCos GCC 4.6 release. It
> will both assure quality of this release and strengthen the image of
> eCos community toolchain.

NP - it is a community effort after all :-)


> In order to best utilize 2 lab. weeks of testing we should have well
> prepared binaries. In my view, it would be the best to carry out the
> eCosCentric lab. test as final release verification step after some
> field testing. In a course of field testing we shall also prepare eCos
> itself, (eliminate warnings, etc.).

We have the opposite view - our test farm finds errors which normal user
and field testing does not catch.  I think the earlier you get the
toolchain into the test farm the better because you will at least
minimise the user and field regression testing needed when you fix
issues thrown up by the farm.

We are happy to throw as many toolchain candidates as needed into the
test farm, with the only restriction being the bandwidth each board runs
the tests, so don't feel you have to hold back and use the farm for
final verification. Our test farm has thrown up far more eCos bugs and
toolchain issues than the rest of the community has to date.


>
> Regarding targets, I don't have objections. However you may find
> interesting Freescale K70 (Cortex-M4F)
> http://www.freescale.com/webapp/sps/site/prod_summary.jsp?code=TWR-K70F120M&parentCode=K70&fpsp=1
>
> mainly because of single precision FPU support. Btw hard-float library
> support for Cortex-M4F will be new feature in this GCC release.
> I must admit that we don't have BSP yet as this is brand new chip but
> am working on it and expect to have it in short time.

That is interesting.  However the two boards I suggested are ones we
physically have so can build and run tests for and are conveniently
currently located in our test farm. We don't have a Freescale K70.  The
publicly available boards we do have can be found at
http://www.ecoscentric.com/ecos/ecospro_tab.shtml, although not all may
be available in our test farm. Is there board in this list you may think
may be better for testing for which a public eCos BSP exists?

Cheers

-- Alex Schuilenburg

Managing Director/CEO                                eCosCentric Limited
www.ecoscentric.com             Reg in England and Wales, Reg No 4422071