Cool Tools - GCC for SPARC^® Systems 4.0.4 - Release Notes

Content

1. Documentation Information
2. System Requirements
   • 2.1 Required OS Patches
3. Installation
4. New Features
5. Differences in Command-Line Options from GCC 4.0.4
6. Differences in Command-Line Options from GCC for SPARC Systems release 4.0.3
7. Debugging Issues
8. Known Bugs
9. Support

1. Documentation Information

In addition to these release notes, the following documentation is available for GCC for SPARC Systems:

General information about the GCC for SPARC Systems project can be found on the following web page: GCC for SPARC Systems Project Home Page

2. System Requirements

2.1 Required OS Patches For proper operation of the GCC for SPARC Systems compiler, the following Solaris patches should be installed on any system on which the GCC for SPARC Systems compilers are to be run:

The appropriate libmtsk patch must be applied to any system on which automatically parallelized programs generated by GCC for SPARC Systems are to be run.

The elfexec patch must be applied on all Solaris 10 Update 1 systems on which binaries instrumented or optimized by BIT will be run.

Each of these patches may be downloaded from http://sunsolve.sun.com. Note that the last two digits of each patch ID is its version number. Patches with version numbers higher than the ones listed above are also acceptable.

If you use components of GNU binutils to process files compiled with -xbinopt=prepare by "GCC for SPARC Systems", you should use binutils version 2.15.96 or later.

3. Installation

GCC for SPARC Systems can be installed by downloading and installing Solaris packages. For details on where to obtain the packages and how to install them, please see the installation guide.

4. New Features

This release builds upon GCCFSS release 4.0.3 by improving the runtime performance and ability to debug g++ programs.

This release is easier to install than previous releases. This release can be installed by any user without having to be superuser. The release is contained in tar balls which can be extracted into any directory where the user has write permission.

5. Differences in Command-Line Options from GCC 4.0.4

The man pages and the output of the --help option of the GCC for SPARC Systems compilers list all of the accepted command-line options.

All compiler options accepted by GCC 4.0.4 are also accepted by GCC for SPARC Systems. However, some of these options have no effect in GCC for SPARC Systems. See the GCC for SPARC Systems Porting Guide for more details.

GCC for SPARC Systems also supports several options that are not supported by GCC 4.0.4. These include -parallel, -fast, and -xipo. See the GCC for SPARC Systems Porting Guide for more details. Certain restrictions must be observed when using the new -xbinopt=prepare option. These are described in the document Using -xbinopt=prepare.

6. Differences in Command-Line Options from GCC for SPARC Systems release 4.0.3

A few minor flags and values for flags have been added.

7. Debugging Issues

GCC for SPARC Systems generates dwarf2 debug information with -g compilation. Currently the generated debug information is incomplete in some respects. This section describes user observable issues when debugging GCC for SPARC Systems generated binaries using the gdb debugger, resulting from incomplete debug information. Although the description focuses mainly on -O0 compilation, similar issues apply to compilation at other optimization levels.

Known issues with -O0 debugging of C/C++ programs can be found in the list of open bugs on www.sun.com (product: GCCFSS).

As of April 1st, 2007 all of the GCC for SPARC Systems problems reported on the CoolTools Forum have been fixed in version 4.0.4.

The bugs.sun.com (product: GCCFSS) contains known bugs with GCC for SPARC Systems. At this time it is not possible to submit bugs via bugs.sun.com. Bugs still need to be submitted via GCCFSS Forum

9. Support

GGC for SPARC Systems uses a community support model. The GCCFSS Forum is also used for reporting bugs. The bugs.sun.com (product GCCFSS) can be used to see the status of GCCFSS bugs. If you want to receive update notifications and other announcements, sign up for the appropriate mailing list