GCC Preps ARMv8.2-A Support In Mainline

Landing in the mainline GCC compiler stack for next year's GCC 7.1 release is initial enablement on ARMv8.2-A support.

ARMv8.2-A is an incremental update to AArch64/ARMv8 and remains backwards compatible with ARMv8.1/ARMv8.0 products. ARMv8.2 adds half-precision floating point data processing, memory model enhancements, RAS support, and statistical profiling support. Those interested in ARMv8.2 can find a summary of it by ARM from earlier this year at community.arm.com.

Among the ARMv8.2 commits hitting the mainline GCC compiler this week includes the various FP16 additions, the CLI option and profile (exposed as armv8.2-a+fp16 and armv8.2-a), and various other changes but it mostly comes down to additions for the FP16 half-precision floating point data processing.

GCC 7 is due to be released as stable in the first half of 2017. See the early GCC 7 feature preview from last month for more of the changes that have been committed thus far in its development cycle.