Dear all, we have an ARM Cortex-A8 board where we are running our application. I am in charge of maintaining the Linux on it and the toolchain/SDK setup. So far we've been running Poky/OpenEmbedded and using the cross compiler that came about during the compilation.
For easier maintenance, we are now switching to Linaro. The image is set up and I can compile, however I notice a peculiar fact: the binary distribution of Linaro's gcc (https://launchpad.net/linaro-toolchain-binaries/trunk/2012.10/+download/gcc-linaro-arm-linux-gnueabihf-4.7-2012.10-20121022_linux.tar.bz2) has a significantly larger compilation speed than a version of arm-linux-gnueabihf-gcc that is shipping with Ubuntu. In our particular case, using Ubuntu's version it takes less than 6 minutes to compile our software, but 10 minutes when we use Linaro's version. The makefiles and source are exactly the same, only the compiler is different. I also tried an older version (4.6) of Linaro's gcc to match the Ubuntu one (tested the 12.04 shipped version), with no significant difference. Compiler flags for the system are -march=armv7-a -mtune=cortex-a8 -mfpu=neon -mfloat-abi=hard Running with -ftime-report, most of the additional time seems to be spent in the parser. Adding -fno-graphite-identity -fno-graphite for Linaro's gcc did not make a difference. I believe I tried to use crosstool-ng to make my own version, but I don't remember the results as this was over 7 weeks ago. I also did not have a chance to compare performance of the binaries. I do notice a difference in compilation sizes (4.8 MB for Ubuntu's 4.6 version, 4.1 MB for Linaro's 4.7 versions - can't test anything other right now). I would like to use Linaro's gcc as the crosscompiler for our project, as it is an easy setup. Repackaging Ubuntu's version is an option, though (some of the team do not use Ubuntu, plus I'd like everybody to use EXACTLY the same version of the crosscompiler). So there is no real "problem" for me, per se, but I am extremely curious as to what is going on here. It seems that Linaro's gcc has additional patches or maybe just different default settings that cause additional time to be spent in the parser. It would be interesting to know what exactly this is and whether/how it can be disabled in those cases where time of compilation is more important than e.g. performance gain. TIA for replying. Best Frank _______________________________________________ linaro-toolchain mailing list linaro-toolchain@lists.linaro.org http://lists.linaro.org/mailman/listinfo/linaro-toolchain
