2004 Q3 release available shortly, GNU/Linux and GDB support coming in Q1 2005

[Mark Mitchell]

Our 2004-Q3 release of the GNU Toolchain for ARM is almost ready!  We're 
presently putting the finishing touches on that release.  Our partners, 
ARM, Ltd. and Symbian, Ltd., have been validating our release for nearly 
a month, and we expect that validation to be fully completed within the 
next two weeks.  Although we recognize that November is not technically 
in the third quarter, we think that investing a little extra up-front 
validation is well worthwhile.

As you may have guessed from the mention of Symbian, this release will 
fully support SymbianOS.  You will be able to use GCC and G++ to build 
applications for SymbianOS.  CodeSourcery's future releases of GCC 
and G++ for ARM will of course continue to support SymbianOS.  The 
2004-Q3 release will also include support for VFP hardware, improved 
code generation for ARM V5 and V6 cores, and must faster C++ 
exception-handling.  And, as promised, our Windows-hosted binaries will 
now be packaged using a Windows installer so that there will be no need 
to unzip or untar the binaries.  Look for a release announcement on 
these lists soon!

Our next release will be the 2005-Q1 release, available on or about 
April 1st, 2005.  This release will contain some exciting new features, 
including out-of-the-box support for GNU/Linux targets, a prebuilt 
version of the GNU C Library (GLIBC) for GNU/Linux, and the addition of 
the GNU Debugger (GDB).  GLIBC will support the Native Posix Threads 
Library (NPTL) and Thread Local Storage (TLS).  GDB will contain support 
for ARM's Remote Device Interface (RDI); you will be able to use GDB to 
talk to all ARM targets that support RDI.

More details about both the upcoming 2004-Q3 release and the 2005-Q1 
release are available in the form of slides presented at ARM DevCon:

http://www.codesourcery.com/downloads/public/gnu_toolchain/arm/documents/ARM%20Devcon%202004.pdf

Sincerely,

-- 
Mark Mitchell
CodeSourcery, LLC
mark at codesourcery.com