OpenACC Changes Merged Today For GCC 5

The OpenACC support was merged for GCC 5 on the final day of permitting new work for this major GPLv3 compiler update.

With stage three development closing per the reminder sent out by Red Hat's Jeff Law, the latest OpenACC work was merged just in time.

Thomas Schwinge of Code Sourcery wrote to the mailing list today:

In r219682, I have committed to trunk our current set of OpenACC changes, which we had prepared on gomp-4_0-branch. Thanks to everyone who has been contributing!

Note that this is an experimental feature, incomplete, and subject to change in future versions of GCC. We shall update -- and keep updated -- https://gcc.gnu.org/wiki/OpenACC, to track the current status. (Please come back to that page in a few days, it has not yet been updated.)

Please note that there are still a handful of patches pending (posted weeks ago, need to ping) that are needed for nvptx offloading, so that's not yet functional.

So the big work that's been going on for quite a while to bring OpenACC 2.0 support to GCC has been merged, but the NVPTX offloading needed for NVIDIA graphics card support in conjunction with the proprietary NVIDIA Linux graphics driver isn't yet committed at the time of writing. That code though has been public since the end of 2013 and improved a lot since that point.

While the OpenACC support is just an experimental feature of GCC 5, there's plenty of other changes to get excited over as covered in dozens of Phoronix articles already and coming up soon will be a Phoronix feature overview of GCC 5 now that stage three development is closing. GCC 5 will likely be officially released around late March or early April.