GCC Maintenance

I'm a regular contributor to the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) project for over a decade. I currently maintain the OS port for Solaris and co-maintain the GCC testsuite. Until their obsoletion in GCC 4.7, I also maintained the OS ports for IRIX, and Tru64 UNIX. This means regularly testing the current development version, reporting and fixing bugs found either by myself or by others, and improving support for those platforms and reporting or working around problems found in native tools like vendor assemblers, linkers, libraries and system headers.

Current projects

Apart from the regular testing, there are a couple of projects currently underway or planned.

Generic

• Enable non-C locales in libstdc++ (cf. --enable-clocale=ieee1003.1-2001).
• Maybe provide GNAT binaries for the platforms I maintain.
• Investigate and improve build and test performance and parallelism using techniques developed for the OS/Net consolidation of OpenSolaris.

Solaris/OpenSolaris

• Support standards-conformant ordering of C++ destructors with __cxa_atexit (OpenSolaris libc prototype ready).
• Investigate support for decimal floating point; will require ABI specification and vendor support in libc.
• Push fixincludes fixes upstream.

Completed projects

The following projects have been completed recently.

Generic

• Support the -m{arch, tune}=native options, either using CPU-specific code or with platform-specific functions.

Solaris/OpenSolaris

• Make use of .eh_frame_hdr sections for the unwinder as soon as Solaris supports them across all platforms (currently amd64 only) and provides the required dl_iterate_phdr function: GCC 4.6.0, snv_157 and up.
• Check for ABI compatiblity of libraries; provide symbol versioning with non-GNU linkers where possible: GCC 4.6.0.
• Provide COMDAT group support with the Sun assembler: Patch ready for GCC 4.6.0, waiting for Sun assembler bug fix.
• Provide COMDAT group support with the GNU assembler and Sun linker: GCC 4.5.1.
• Investigate and fix problems found when building GCC with the Sun assembler on amd64: feature parity between Sun as and GNU as achieved as far as possible for GCC 4.5.0; opened bug reports with Sun for the rest.

Test Farm

The tests are run on a small test farm of mostly old donated or retired machines.

• Sun Fire X4440 with 4 6-core 2.6 GHz AMD Opteron Processor 8435 CPUs and 128 GB RAM, running Solaris 11.4 Beta, Solaris 11.3 inside a kernel zone (retired machine)
• Sun Fire X4450 with 4 quad-core 2.93 GHz Intel Xeon X7350 CPUs and 32 GB RAM, running Solaris 10 (retired machine)
• Oracle Netra SPARC S7-2 with 2 8-core 4.27 GHz SPARC S7 CPUs and 256 GB RAM, running Solaris 11.4 Beta, Solaris 11.3 inside a kernel zone, and Solaris 10 inside an LDom (long-term loan graciously provided by Oracle).
• LDom on an Oracle SPARC T5-2 with up to 3/4 16-core 3.6 GHz SPARC T5 CPU and 40 GB RAM, running Solaris 11.4 Beta, Solaris 11.3 inside a kernel zone (production machine, LDom graciously provided by the University Computing Center)

The following machines are no longer in active use because they have become too slow or the OS versions they run are no longer supported by GCC. Two of these machines were donated by Sun Microsystems via the Academic Excellence Grant program

• Sun SPARC Enterprise T5220 with 1 8-core 1.2 GHz UltraSPARC T2 CPU and 32 GB RAM, running Solaris 12 Beta (AEG grant by Sun Microsystems)
• Sun Fire V890 with 8 1350 MHz UltraSPARC IV CPUs and 64 GB RAM, running Solaris 11 (retired machine)
• Sun SPARC Enterprise T5120 with 1 8-core 1.2 GHz UltraSPARC T2 CPU and 32 GB RAM, running Solaris 10 (retired machine)
• Sun Fire T2000 with 1 8-core 1.2 GHz UltraSPARC T1 CPU and 32 GB RAM, running Solaris 10 with Solaris 8 and 9 branded zones
• Sun Fire X4600 M2 with 8 dual-core 2.6 GHz AMD Opteron 8218 CPUs and 32 GB RAM, running Solaris 11.4 Beta (AEG grant by Sun Microsystems)
• Sun Fire V20z with 2 1.8 GHz AMD Opteron 244 CPUs and 12 GB RAM, running Solaris 9 (retired machine)
• Sun Fire V20z with 2 2.4 GHz AMD Opteron 250 CPUs and 12 GB RAM, running Solaris 8 (retired machine)