AMD HSA IL / BRIG Front-End Still Hoping To Get Into GCC 7

For many months now there's been work on an AMD HSA IL front-end for GCC with supporting the BRIG binary form of the Heterogeneous System Architecture Intermediate Language (HSA IL). It's getting late into GCC 7 development and onwards to its final development stage while this new front-end has yet to be merged.

Developer Pekka Jääskeläinen has been trying to get in the finishing reviews and changes for getting approval to land this BRIG front-end into the GNU Compiler Collection. It's a big addition and with GCC 7 soon just focusing on wrong-code fixes, bug fixes, and documentation fixes starting on 19 January, there would be just a few days left to land this new front-end for GCC 7 to avoid having to wait until next year for it to debut in stable with GCC 8.

Pekka Jääskeläinen who has been working on this BRIG code has been active in this mailing list thread sending out pings, making a few revisions to the patches, and addressing other questions with Richard Biener doing some of the review work. But as of this morning it's still not clear whether this front-end will be pulled into GCC mainline or not.

With already waiting years for the Heterogeneous System Architecture to really become a reality on the Linux desktop, hopefully we'll see this front-end merged in time for GCC 7 along with AMD's other open-source HSA/OpenCL/GPGPU efforts pan out in the months ahead.