Since release 3.3, a lot of new features have been included in the ARM back-end but weren’t production ready (ie. well tested) on release 3.4. Just after the 3.4 release, we started heavily testing two major parts of the back-end: the integrated assembler (IAS) and the ARM exception handling (EHABI), and now they are enabled by default on LLVM/Clang.

The IAS received a lot of GNU extensions and directives, as well as some specific pre-UAL instructions. Not all remaining directives will be implemented, as we made judgement calls on the need versus the complexity, and have chosen simplicity and future compatibility where hard decisions had to be made. The major difference is, as stated above, the IAS validates all inline ASM, not just for object emission, and that cause trouble with some uses of inline ASM as pre-processor magic.

So, while the IAS is good enough to compile large projects (including most of the Linux kernel), there are a few things that we can’t (and probably won’t) do. For those cases, please use -fno-integrated-as in Clang.

Exception handling is another big change. After extensive testing and changes to cooperate with Dwarf unwinding, EHABI is enabled by default. The options -arm-enable-ehabi and -arm-enable-ehabi-descriptors , which were used to enable EHABI in the previous releases, are removed now.

This means all ARM code will emit EH unwind tables, or CFI unwinding (for debug/profiling), or both. To avoid run-time inconsistencies, C code will also emit EH tables (in case they interoperate with C++ code), as is the case for other architectures (ex. x86_64).