Latest Linaro GCC Toolchain Release Supports Full Range of ARM Cortex-A Processors

San Francisco - February 10, 2012 - Linaro, the not-for-profit engineering organization consolidating and optimizing open source software for the ARM architecture, announced today the 2012.02 release of Linaro GCC 4.6 and Linaro GCC 4.5 which offers full support for the ARM Cortex-A processors family including the Cortex-A5, Cortex-A7, Cortex-A8, Cortex-A9 and Cortex-A15. This new release helps Linaro continue to provide companies with a foundation on which they can rapidly build and deliver innovative, differentiated solutions.  

The Linaro Toolchain Working Group finalized this release during open Linaro Connect sessions on Wednesday February 8th. Over 200 engineers from more than 40 companies attended a week of sessions, planning future work and discussing challenges facing the Linux community developing solutions on the ARM architecture.

Accompanying the release are complete notes, details of bug fixes and links to the source tarballs. Downloads are available from the Linaro GCC page on Launchpad.

Linaro GCC 4.6 2012.02 is the twelfth release in the 4.6 series. Based on the latest GCC 4.6.2+svn183786, it contains bug fixes and backports Cortex-A7 and Cortex-A15 support from the FSF (Free Software Foundation) trunk. In addition to the updates to 4.6.2+svn183786 and initial Cortex-A7 support, the most interesting changes in this release are the backporting of Cortex-A15 tuning improvements from upstream and improvements to 64-bit unsigned comparisons.

Linaro GCC 4.5 2012.02 is the eighteenth release in the 4.5 series. Based on the latest GCC 4.5.3+svn183785, it is a maintenance only release.

These toolchains are the latest downloads enabling Linaro members to develop advanced products and are part of its standard monthly release cycle. The Linaro Toolchain Working Group release occurs two weeks before Linaro's main release day which is scheduled for 16:00 UTC on Thursday February 23rd.

The releases include versions of Linaro's binary platform images, component sources, board support packages and infrastructure/validation tools to ensure that Linaro output can be consumed most easily by the ARM development community, product builders and enthusiasts.

Join us at Linaro Connect

Linaro Connect is held every three to four months to bring the Linux on ARM community together to work on the latest system-on-chip (SoC) developments, plan new engineering efforts and hold engineering hacking sessions. These events give the Linux community an opportunity to be a part of the Linaro team and help to define the ARM tools, Linux kernels and builds of key Linux distributions including Android and Ubuntu on member SoCs. Join us for the current event February 6-10th in San Francisco, California or the Q2 Linaro Connect May 28th - June 1st in Hong Kong. Learn more at connect.linaro.org

About Linaro

Linaro is a not-for-profit engineering organization working on consolidating and optimizing open source software for the ARM architecture, including the GCC (GNU Compiler Collection) toolchain, the Linux kernel, ARM power management, graphics and multimedia interfaces. Linaro's key value is in working on generic ARM technology that is common to all ARM SoC vendors. In this way engineering costs are shared, rather than each vendor having to implement core software technology themselves, which has historically resulted in fragmentation and overhead in maintaining code that cannot be upstreamed to the mainline Linux kernel and other open source projects. Linaro's output is used by its members, and by distributions including Android, Ubuntu and OEM/ODM customized versions of Linux. Linaro's goals are to deliver value to its members by enabling their engineering teams to focus on differentiation and product delivery, and to reduce time to market for OEM/ODMs delivering open source based products using ARM technology. For more information, please visit www.linaro.org