gas: .align padding

[Andrew Morton <akpm@bigfoot.com>]

Good morning.  A few things:

----
When padding .aligns gas seems to put random gunk into the object file
instead of nops or nulls. Can this be fixed?



bix:~> cat t.s
        nop
        .align 8
        nop

bix:~> objdump --disassemble t.o

t.o:     file format elf32-i386

Disassembly of section .text:

00000000 <.text>:
   0:   90                      nop
   1:   8d b4 26 00 00 00 00    leal   0x0(%esi,1),%esi
   8:   90                      nop

bix:~> as -v
GNU assembler version 2.9.1 (i386-mandrake-linux), using BFD version
2.9.1.0.25

bix:~> uname -a
Linux bix 2.2.9-27mdk #1 Mon Jun 14 16:44:05 CEST 1999 i586 unknown


----

I've noticed that if you have "." ahead of /usr/bin in $PATH then
binutils' configure script fails mysteriously.  It turns out this is
because collect2 is trying to execute the directory 'ld' in the binutils
toplevel.

I'm sure this is a known gcc problem (libiberty/pexecute, perhaps?), but
don't we think something a bit more user friendly can be done?

----

Finally...  I'd like to be wildly unorthodox here and actually
congratulate you folks on the GNU development system.  I used to bang on
this stuff quite a lot five years ago, and as I now revisit it I'm quite
astonished at the quality and at the amount of work that's been added.

There's a tendency 'out there' to take all this for granted, which is
regrettable because these products really are the foundation of
_everything_.

So, thanks!


- Andrew.