Once again, experts from our SUSE toolchain development team (Jan Hubička, Michael Matz, Richard Biener) led by Martin Jambor have joined forces with Brent Hollingsworth from AMD, to publish a new SUSE Best Practices guide. The document “Advanced Optimization and New Capabilities of GCC 12” provides a detailed overview of the most current GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) 12.

What’s in for you?

The document mainly addresses the following two questions:

• How can (or should) you select appropriate optimization options for your application?
• What are the benefits of advanced compilation modes?

And don’t be mistaken: Although the document is focusing on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server https://www.suse.com/products/server/,
the content is definitely useful and interesting for any GCC user.

Want more details?

First, the document explains the differences between the compiler delivered with the system and newer versions of GCC you can get via
the Development Tool Module. This includes instructions how to install the latest GCC12 from the module. Then you you learn about the
optimization levels that GCC12 offers, and how to take advantage of new generation processors.

But the document also shares information about other important options developers often use. As an example, it explains in deep detail
when and how you can benefit from using Link Time Optimization (LTO) and Profile Guided Optimization (PGO) builds. What’s more,
you learn about their effects when building a set of well-known CPU intensive benchmarks.

The final section of the document highlights selected results of a GCC 12 evaluation using the SPEC CPU 2017 benchmark suite, including runtimes measured on an AMD EPYC 9654 Processor running SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 15 SP4.

Curious now?

If you want to dig a bit deeper now, just have a look yourself and enjoy reading the document! Find it on our SUSE Best Practices Web page here .

Disclaimer: The text at hand has been written by a non-native English speaker. If you find typos or language mistakes, please send them to me
(meike.chabowski@suse.com) – or if you like them, just keep them and feed them. 😁