February has been an exciting period for ARM: from the announcement of new products for the Premium Mobile segment to the release of the new DS-5 v.5.20.2
DS-5 v5.20.2 includes ARM Compiler 6.01, the latest LLVM based ARM Compiler. The main highlights of ARM Compiler 6.01 are:
This release brings to the market the most advanced compilation technology in ARM Compiler 6.01 for the new ARMv8-A Cortex-A72 (-mcpu=cortex-a72) processor. With the support of the Cortex-A72, ARM Compiler continues to provide early-support for new cores to enable our customers to start developing as soon as possible and reduce the time-to-market.
The new release of ARM Compiler adds support for ARMv7 Cortex-A class processors, enabling customers to take advantage of the new compiler for a wider range of products.
ARM Compiler 6.01 brings the advanced code generation used to build ARMv8 code to the more consolidated 32bit world, speeding up the adoption of the new compiler for companies not yet using ARMv8.
There’s more: ARM Compiler 6.01 adds initial (alpha quality) support for both Cortex-M and Cortex-R families to let engineers familiarise themselves with the new features and start the evaluation as soon as possible.
For more details see the release notes for ARM Compiler 6.01.
Security has become a crucial aspect of applications, especially when connected to the network or available on the internet. One of the most common attacks to gain privilege on a system is through buffer overflows: this anomaly could potentially lead to the execution of malicious code, jeopardizing the security of the entire system through code injection.
Different techniques have been created to make a hackers’ life harder, one of the most commonly used to reduce the risk of attacks is to randomize the address space layout (ASLR). This technique is widely used in several high-level Operating Systems like Android, iOS, Linux and Windows. With ARM Compiler 6.01 it’s possible to extend the usage of this protection also on bare-metal applications.
ARM Compiler 6.01 allows the creation of bare-metal Position Independent Executables (PIE) which allows the executable to be loaded anywhere in the memory and the code will automatically recalculate the new addresses. More details are on infocenter about the Compiler command line option –fbare-metal-pie and Linker command line option –fpic.
ARM Compiler is able to optimise code generated from each source file to get the best performance out of ARM processors. But what about optimising the different modules? ARM Compiler 6.01 introduces initial support for Link Time Optimization (LTO), which extends the capability of the compiler and the linker to perform optimizations by looking at the whole program and not just a single compilation unit, giving an extra performance boost!
To enable Link Time Optimization in ARM Compiler 6.01, take a look at the documentation in infocenter about Linker command line option –lto.
I hope that you found this information useful and you are ready to use ARM Compiler 6.01! If you still don’t have DS-5, download a free 30-day evaluation .
Feel free to post any questions or comments below.
Ciao,
Stefano
Hi Yasuhiko, Thanks for your question. ARM Compiler 6.01 targeting bare-metal applications includes both device independent optimization and device specific optimization. In order to get the best performance out of a core you can use the -mcpu command line option (for example -mcpu=Cortex-A72). In addition to the original LLVM, ARM Compiler 6.01 provides highly optimized libraries, a proprietary linker (armlink), assembler (armasm) and specific features like --fbare-metal-pie. Hope this helps. Best Regards, Stefano