From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: cgd@broadcom.com To: "H . J . Lu" Cc: mrg@cygnus.com, binutils@sources.redhat.com, thorpej@wasabisystems.com, simonb@wasabisystems.com Subject: Re: [PATCH] Fix distinction of 32/64bit addresses in MIPS gas Date: Thu, 06 Sep 2001 11:38:00 -0000 Message-id: References: <20010831190655.B8746@lucon.org> <16878.999310218@cygnus.com> <20010906110030.A32621@lucon.org> X-SW-Source: 2001-09/msg00056.html "H . J . Lu" writes: > Here is the thing. "make check" in binutils doesn't do much on > NetBSD/mips. It also used to be the case for Linux/mips until I turned > on them for Linux/mips. I also added a few new mips testcases. Quite > a few serious mips bugs have been identified/fixed since then. Oh, I understand that. The problem becomes, what's a bug and what's a feature? 8-) Yes, something might be a bug w.r.t. an ABI standard that nobody started following until 6 months ago. But e.g. some of the changes to binutils will cause binary compatibility for NetBSD/mips binaries, which have been using the old MIPS ELF ABI implemented by binutils for ... 3+ years. I don't disagree that bugs need to be fixed, but some of the fixes will cause some groups real pain. (No, there's no real point there. 8-) > Without > active participation from NetBSD/mips, we have no idea if the current > toolchain works, which also include gcc and gdb, on NetBSD/mips or not. Agreed. I've advocated for ... years that NetBSD should do Better Things than it historically has, w.r.t. toolchain stuff. But i'm not really in a position to do them myself since for the most part I'm not paid to work on NetBSD and I have limited time outside of work for such hacking. It's getting better, but is a long way from good. > The only mips testsuite results for gcc I can find are Irix and Linux. > It won't surprise me that the next release of gcc/binutils won't work > on NetBSD/mips, out of box. GCC isn't relevant here, is it? I mean, binutils is supposed to be a usable compiler with gcc, without gcc, and also with random (not-current) versions of gcc. NetBSD is ... much less likely to upgrade to a new version of gcc than to a new version of binutils. Indeed, it's almost certain that the next release of binutils won't work on NetBSD/mips. Even if the trivial things were fixed (and they could be, and i plan to work on them to the extent that I can), there's still this non-trivial (to my eyes, at least) ABI change. The point of my message was mostly informational: i think the list should be aware that there are issues re: MIPS ABIs, current binutils, and compatibility with a system that's been using binutils to generate dynamically-linked MIPS ELF binaries for years. It's going to crop up again in the future, and I thought i'd put something down on record so that when it does people would have something to look at. 8-) chris