GCC 11 Ends Feature Development While Still Waiting For AMD Znver3 Support

As was expected, formal feature development is now over for GCC 11 and it's time for bug fixing.

Longtime GCC developer Richard Biener of SUSE announced today that the development trunk has shifted to stage three development. This shift means the focus now is on general bug fixing rather than adding of new features.

And plenty of bug fixing there will be. Biener noted in the status update, "We have accumulated quite a number of regressions, a lot of the untriaged and eventually stale. Please help in cleaning up."

GCC 11 has twenty-five new P1 through P3 regressions. GCC 11 is at 37 bugs of P1 status (the highest priority regressions), 257 P2 regressions, and 94 P3 regressions. There are also another 208 P4/P5 regressions. The overall P1 through P3 regression/bug count is at 388.

GCC 11 has seen a lot of changes for this annual compiler update including nearly complete Intel Sapphire Rapids and Alder Lake support, x86-64 microarchitecture levels, more device/GPU offloading work, continued work on its JIT library, more C++20 support, and much more as we'll outline and benchmark in the weeks ahead.

Sadly though the AMD Zen 3 (znver3) CPU target has yet to be merged or rather AMD has yet to post the Clang and GCC compiler patches for them. We previously heard early November but that didn't materialize yet for enabling the few new instructions on Zen 3 and ideally a more optimized scheduler model / cost table. In any case hopefully the Znver3 support when published will still be permitted for landing in trunk, which we've seen similar late additions honored for GCC, but unfortunate the support wasn't more timely.

GCC 11 is now focused on bug fixing while the stable GCC 11.1 release should be out in March~April if all goes well.