[avr-gcc-list] GCC 4.4.0

[Weddington, Eric]

Hi All,

Special note to toolchain distribution maintainers, and people who build the 
toolchain themselves:

GCC 4.4.0 will soon be released (within days). One of the major new features of 
the 4.4 series is a new Integrated Register Allocator (IRA) for all ports, 
including the AVR. 

While some testing has shown that AVR GCC 4.4.0 still passes many of the 
regression tests in GCC, there has NOT been much testing or benchmarking of the 
AVR with the new IRA. There are still many unknowns about the code generation. 
Perhaps everything is just fine; perhaps there a new code generation bugs 
lurking. We just don't know for sure.

Because of these unknowns, the WinAVR distribution will be using the 4.3.x 
series (4.3.3 <= version < 4.4.0) for the foreseeable future, until such 
testing and benchmarking can be done and it can be shown that 4.4.x is 
relatively safe to use for the AVR.

Eric Weddington