Re: [PATCH 1/8] ld: Rename aarch64pe emulation target to arm64pe

[Mark Harmstone <mark@harmstone.com>]

Hi Tamar,

Is there any practical benefit to this? The emulation "aarch64pe" hasn't yet been seen in a released version of binutils, so it's not that anybody's relying on it. Giving the emulation a different name from LLVM, then adding a workaround so that LLVM still works, seems like it's adding unneeded complexity. Plus it also implies that someone will also have to patch LLVM to add a workaround the other way round.

It's not like there's any consistency in the emulation naming as it is, as `ld -m help` will show you. Of the ELF emulations, some have "elf" at the beginning, some at the end, some have "elf32" or "elf64", others (presumably) have it implicit, some have underscores, some don't...

Mark

On 3/1/23 14:54, Tamar Christina wrote:
> Hi All,
>
> After some discussions, we would prefer if instead of renaming actual emul target
> (which also renamed the internal macros) that we provide a `targ_emul_alias` or similar
> instead.  This would allow us to keep the current naming as is, while still supporting the
> the emul as supported by clang.
>
> This would be similar to the already existing targ_alias which is used to alias the target
> triples.
>
> I believe (from a quick look) that this should all be do-able by modifying configure.ac in a
> similar way as targ_extra_emuls currently does.
>
> Thanks,
> Tamar
>
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: Martin Storsjö <martin@martin.st>
>> Sent: Tuesday, January 3, 2023 2:14 PM
>> To: Richard Earnshaw <Richard.Earnshaw@foss.arm.com>
>> Cc: Tamar Christina <Tamar.Christina@arm.com>; NightStrike
>> <nightstrike@gmail.com>; Mark Harmstone <mark@harmstone.com>;
>> wej22007@outlook.com; zac.walker@linaro.org; binutils
>> <binutils@sourceware.org>; nickc@redhat.com
>> Subject: Re: [PATCH 1/8] ld: Rename aarch64pe emulation target to arm64pe
>>
>> On Tue, 3 Jan 2023, Richard Earnshaw via Binutils wrote:
>>
>>> The problem with arm64 is that it also matches existing configure
>>> scripts that use arm* for the 32-bit targets.  I don't think this is a good idea.
>>> GNU tools have consistently used the official name for all targets.
>> This isn't for the name used in triples (which often are matched in configure
>> scripts etc), but used for the ld emulation mode - where the current MinGW
>> targets use the names "i386pe" for i386 and and "i386pep"
>> for x86_64. I don't believe it's common to match those emulation names in
>> configure scripts - these names are mostly a detail between how the
>> compiler driver invokes the linker, and the linker itself.
>>
>> // Martin