GNU Toolchains for Semiconductor Vendors

If you represent a semiconductor vendor, you want:

• A toolchain that supports the most recent additions to your hardware family, including optimizations that take advantage of the best your chips have to offer.

• Toolchains that are available as soon as possible; it's imperative that toolchains be available by the time prototype chips are reaching your customers, if not before.

• Easy-to-install binaries that have been thoroughly tested, so that your users can quickly validate their software on your hardware.

• The assurance that future versions of the GNU Toolchain to continue to support your hardware.

You've come to the right place.

Optimization

CodeSourcery has extensive experience optimizing the GNU Toolchain. CodeSourcery has made modifications and improvements to the GNU Toolchain for many common architecture families, including ARM, IA32, MIPS, PowerPC, and SPARC. CodeSourcery works with its customers to develop complete support for their processors, including optimizations like instruction selection, register allocation, and scheduling.

Quality

CodeSourcery does not believe in a one-size-fits-all approach to testing. Every customer has different needs, and CodeSourcery will provide a testing plan that satisfies whatever requirements you may have.

CodeSourcery always suggests that the testing plan include the thousands of tests in the regression testsuites provided with the GNU C Compiler, GNU C++ Compiler, GNU Assembler, and other tools that make up the GNU Toolchain. These tests provide comprehensive coverage of the functionality provided by the GNU Toolchain, and have proven extremely valuable in finding problems with ports to new hardware platforms. CodeSourcery adds new tests as it adds support for new hardware.

CodeSourcery can also run language conformance testsuites (like the Plum-Hall C and C++ Validation Suites) or performance testsuites (including SPEC CPU2000). CodeSourcery can build real-world applications (like the Apache web server) to provide further validation.

Support

For semiconductor vendors, CodeSourcery recommends regular releases of the GNU Toolchain (quarterly, semiannually, or following FSF releases). These regular releases include updates and improvements to the GNU Toolchain, as well as support for additional chips as they become available. CodeSourcery performs the same quality assurance performed for the original release, and corrects any regressions.

CodeSourcery also offers support contracts that cover a predetermined number of support requests for a fixed fee. And, CodeSourcery provides end-user support priced based on the number of developers using the toolchain.

Community

Most semiconductor vendors want to ensure that future versions of the GNU Toolchain, including those shipped by GNU/Linux distributors, RTOS vendors, and other third parties, will include the improvements developed by CodeSourcery. CodeSourcery's team of highly-respected GNU Toolchain developers (which includes a number of official Free Software Foundation maintainers) contributes CodeSourcery's changes to the official FSF source trees. These changes are therefore available to the community as a whole, and form part of the FSF's future source releases.