GCC 11 Is Moving Closer But Still Challenged By Many Regressions

GCC 11 is slated to enter "Stage 4" development at the end of this weekend after which only regression and documentation fixes will be permitted. The first GCC 11 stable release should be out in 2~3 months, but at the moment there is an increasing number of P1 regressions that are of the highest priority.

SUSE's Richard Biener announced today that GCC 11 will transition from stage three to stage four at the end of the week, at which point only regression fixes and documentation updates can be merged to trunk.

There has been though another 30 P1 regressions, which are bugs of the highest priority, bringing the total count to 67. There is also 331 P2 regressions, 34 P3 regressions, 190 P4 regressions, and 24 P5 regressions. While some 60 P3 regressions were closed, there is a net gain of around 50 new bugs since the prior GCC 11 status report.

This newest GCC 11 report can be read here. It depends how quickly those highest priority bugs are addressed (or demoted to lower priority) before seeing GCC 11.1 as the first stable release, but by past cycles that should happen in March~April.

The only downside of moving to stage four now abandons hopes of seeing more complete AMD Zen 3 (znver3) support for this release. The initial code was merged last month but lacking various tuning and other improvements over the prior znver1/znver2 targets. Thus the more optimal Znver3 support will have to wait until hopefully just a few months later in the first GCC 11 point release should it be back-ported to avoid waiting until next year's GCC 12.

GCC 11 benchmarks and feature overview will be up on Phoronix in the weeks ahead.