Re: 68hc11/12/s12x/xgate patch

[Sean Keys <skeys@ipdatasys.com>]

To follow up on Fred's email, some of the results in the spreadsheet 
linked were not accurate. The reason is that when I tried to assemble my 
test code I got "Relocation 14 is not supported by object file format". 
  This error was caused by having a typo in the label identifier. The 
error message is non-intuitive and made it difficult to notice the 
mistake, especially considering the volume of other errors. I apologize 
for the mistake, and misleading information given, however these errors 
still seem to stand:

xgate.s: Assembler messages:
xgate.s:329: Error: Opcode `bhs' is not recognized.
xgate.s:333: Error: Opcode `blo' is not recognized.
xgate.s:346: Error: Opcode `com' is not recognized.
xgate.s:347: Error: Opcode `cpc' is not recognized.
xgate.s:348: Error: Opcode `cpc' is not recognized.
xgate.s:362: Error: Garbage at end of instruction: `ErrorHandler'.   In 
my opinion, 'ldw' should be added as an alias to 'ld' as per the CPU 
reference manual.
xgate.s:370: Error: Opcode `mov' is not recognized.
xgate.s:371: Error: Opcode `neg' is not recognized.
xgate.s:400: Error: Opcode `tst' is not recognized.

I have some technical questions to ask on this subject too, and will 
send those at a later date.

Regards,
Sean

On 12/21/2011 03:29 PM, Fred Cooke wrote:
>> On Tue, 20 Dec 2011 23:29:37 +0100 Fred Cooke wrote:
>>> To the maintainers: I would recommend holding off a little longer on
>>> accepting this into the upstream repository. I head a project that
>>> uses these tools and I believe there are some issues with this patch
>>> that are yet to be shown.
>> Could you be more specific? What leads you to believe there are issues
>> with this patch?
> You missed a bit, James!
>
>> There should be more information available inside the next 24 hours. Hopefully that is not too long to wait.
>>
>> Thank you in advance for your patience.
> I take it you're not feeling particularly patient, nevertheless, good
> things take time, and rushed things are rarely good enough, as you'll
> soon see. Feel free to skip the two paragraphs which amount to a
> political history lesson and go right for the comparison link.
>
> Way back in 2008 James released his initial work on an XGATE Binutils
> patch and published it on the internet. At the time I was hard at work
> on my project which also uses an XGATE core and, naturally, I was
> quite interested in this work. I grabbed a copy of that work at the
> time, however I can't find it right now. Shortly afterward I noticed
> that all of the files had been pulled from circulation and requested
> that James email me his work so that we could collaborate in testing
> and development with him. I was not the only one to request these
> files during that period, however nobody had their request fulfilled.
> Although he was perfectly within his rights to do what he did, it
> never struck me as a particularly moral thing to do with a
> foundational GNU package. Late in 2010 James re-released his work, and
> because of his earlier behaviour I decided to cache it here:
>
> http://tools.diyefi.org/james/s12x-tools-source-20101029.zip
>
> In the mean time, and in the absence of James sharing his changes with
> other members of the community, Sean Keys started work on a parallel
> effort to produce a working tool-chain for the S12X platform including
> an XGATE assembler and linker. Sean assures me that he did extensive
> manual checking and comparative checking to ensure that his work was
> of the best possible quality. He says that he used CodeWarrior as a
> bench mark as that is the suite that the manufacturer of the chipset
> provides - they should know! When we saw that James was trying to
> upstream his work, we decided, for the benefit of all future users,
> and because it was the right thing to do, to give it a once over and
> make sure that it functioned as advertised. Sean has assembled some
> results in a spreadsheet which I've published on our tools page, which
> has been up, since October 16, 2010, for more than a year.
>
> http://tools.diyefi.org/XGATE-AssemblerComparison.html
>
> I'll have to leave it to Sean to explain what he found in his testing
> as I have some other tasks to complete today, however I hope that the
> maintainers of Binutils will observe the missing instructions which
> render James' tools unable to build other existing code bases for this
> chipset. From cross examining Sean and from looking into some of this
> behaviour myself, I believe that this patch is not ready for prime
> time. Sean should be available to follow up on this email in an hour
> or two or three. Again, I hope your patience extends that far, James
> excluded, his clearly does not.
>
> Regards,
>
> Fred.
>
> On Wed, Dec 21, 2011 at 12:22 AM, James Murray<jsm@jsm-net.demon.co.uk>  wrote:
>> On Tue, 20 Dec 2011 23:29:37 +0100 Fred Cooke wrote:
>>> To the maintainers: I would recommend holding off a little longer on
>>> accepting this into the upstream repository. I head a project that
>>> uses these tools and I believe there are some issues with this patch
>>> that are yet to be shown.
>> Could you be more specific? What leads you to believe there are issues
>> with this patch?
>>
>> It is a cleanup of the patch posted here in March and the same as the
>> tools on http://www.msextra.com/tools that have been in use for a few
>> years now.
>>
>> regards
>>
>> James
>>