Using CMSIS with GCC

My interest in ARM Cortex-M3 based micros recently turned into some practical exercises with STM32-H103, GCC and Cortex Microcontroller Software Interface Standard (CMSIS) library. CMSIS is a useful set of definitions of Cortex-M0/M3 core architecture registers, data structures and interfaces to access core resources of a Cortex-M0/M3 based microcontroller. However, if you use GCC with CMSIS (v1.2.0 or v1.3.0) the definition of __INLINE macro provided in core_cm3.h and core_cm0.h:

#define __INLINE inline

does not force the compiler to actually inline the body of a function defined with __INLINE attribute. To tell GCC to inline the define should be:

#define __INLINE __attribute__((always_inline)) inline

Furthermore, __get_xxx, __set_xxx, __LDREX, __STREX groups of a single assembly line functions implemented as a regular functions as oppose to inline functions. Change of these functions to inline style allowed two times improvement of the performance of certain fragments of my code.