[ELDK] ELDK 5.1.1: GCC 4.6.1 optimization settings generating invalid computation order/results.

Wolfgang Denk wd at denx.de
Thu Mar 15 09:59:51 CET 2012


Dear Patrick,

In message <CAJV+WJ1E_cpARTbX1P1DFWHe8bRJrYyjopMpBZfmrj0s1d=24w at mail.gmail.com> you wrote:
> 
> We have been working with your ELDK 5.1.1 toolchain (powerpc-4xx) for some
> weeks now, and had noticed inconsistent behavior between our old firmware
> image (generated with ELDK 4.1) and new firmware image (generated with ELDK
> 5.1.1).
> Specifically we were seeing inconsistent results from one particular code
> block which was doing quite a bit of bit manipulation.

Can you share a minimal piece of code that shows the problem?

Do you see any compiler warnings for this code when building with
"-Wall -pedantic" ?

Did you consider reporting this on the GCC mailing list?

> We are advising internally in our development group that the following
> flags be added to CFLAGS when building any code with the ELDK 5.1.1
>     OPP_FLAG_SETTINGS = -fno-tree-ccp -fno-tree-bit-ccp

I really would like to see the difference in the generated code
between ELDk 4.1, 4.2, 5.0 and 5.1 (with and withoutt hese options).
So it would really be helful if you could provide a minimal example of
code that shows this.

> Don't know if this is related to the following:
> 
>    - http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.comp.gcc.bugs/338704
>    - http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.comp.gcc.bugs/304411

Hm... I can't tell for sure, but at first glance t doesn't look so. At
least the symptoms are different: the bugs referenced here result
either in a SIGSEGV crash, or in an "internal compiler error" abort,
but not in generation of incorrect code.

> This is our current workaround, and planned development path. However, we
> wanted to know if you had seen similar issues, or know of other means of
> configuring GCC to use this as default behavior rather than adding to flags
> to each makefile/build scripts.

I was / am not aware of any such issues.

If you want to change the default settings of GCC, you can change it's
configuration in the build scripts
("meta/recipes-devtools/gcc/gcc-configure-common.inc") and rebuild
everything.

> Also, how are the prebuilt images built (glibc, gdb, etc) i.e. assuming
> some optimization level enabled.

Yes, indeed these are built with optimization enabled.

Best regards,

Wolfgang Denk

-- 
DENX Software Engineering GmbH,     MD: Wolfgang Denk & Detlev Zundel
HRB 165235 Munich, Office: Kirchenstr.5, D-82194 Groebenzell, Germany
Phone: (+49)-8142-66989-10 Fax: (+49)-8142-66989-80 Email: wd at denx.de
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