Re: I mainly need an as and ld port

["Frank Ch. Eigler" <fche@redhat.com>]

Hi -

> [...]  Is CGEN overkill for what I am trying to do?

Not really, but recall that even CGEN handles only a part of the
binutils port.  There is stuff to hand-write with or without CGEN,
and of course more without it.

> The Z8000 is sort of close to the MECA-43.  Basically all 16 bit
> instructions and both 16 and 32 bit data.

The more regular, RISC-like the instruction set, the better fit
it is for CGEN.

> [...] I have no clue how to run Emacs and the info document reader
> thing doesn't know anything about the files that I want to look at.)

The "make info" in build directories like gas/, bfd/, etc. can help,
and some even have a "make html" target in their doc/ subdirs.  If
it's too much hassle to figure it out, of course the .texi files are
readable ASCII.


> I can't find out how to make a file like z8kgen.c. All the things
> are encoded with codes that I can't find any description of.

z8kgen.c is not related to cgen, except perhaps as a motivation.
There are several other generator type tools in the whole toolchain
(for another, see igen in the gdb simulators).  CGEN was meant to
unify and generalize them.

> Your suggestion of hand-written gas/bfd/ld/simulator code seems
> the way to go. Hours of searching has produced no results for
> information on the exact files to be made, the exact format of
> each files,  how to update the make files for automake, etc. etc.

There is no substitute for a certain amount of self-education to gain
familiarity with the configury system in general, and the specific
build procedure for a similar existing target.

My simple recipe is to duplicate an existing target by a mass copy &
rename.  Pick a base target for replication like "iq2000" or "ip2k",
which are strings unlikely to occur elsewhere.

- FChE