SGI IRIX 6.4 & gas

SGI IRIX 6.4 & gas

[Mark Mitchell]

Folks --

  The helpful installation guidelines with egcs say:

    mips*-sgi-irix6
    You must not use GAS on irix6 platforms; doing so will only cause
    problems. 

  But, I've now run into the problem of mangled names that are too
long for the IRIX as to handle.  Is the prohibition in the docs still
correct?  If so, does anyone recall the specific problem; it might be
worth it to me to fix it.

  Thanks,

-- 
Mark Mitchell <mmitchell@usa.net>
http://home.earthlink.net/~mbmitchell
Consulting Services Available

Re: SGI IRIX 6.4 & gas

[Ian Lance Taylor]

   Date: Fri, 27 Mar 1998 14:11:13 -0800
   From: Mark Mitchell <mmitchell@usa.net>

     The helpful installation guidelines with egcs say:

       mips*-sgi-irix6
       You must not use GAS on irix6 platforms; doing so will only cause
       problems. 

     But, I've now run into the problem of mangled names that are too
   long for the IRIX as to handle.  Is the prohibition in the docs still
   correct?  If so, does anyone recall the specific problem; it might be
   worth it to me to fix it.

There is no specific problem.  gas has simply never been ported to run
on Irix 6.

For example, gas does not support the -n32 or -64 options.  It always
generates object files which are marked as -o32.  I believe that
adding support for the -64 option would require enhancing the 64 bit
MIPS ELF support that exists in BFD.  There is currently a partial
implementation in bfd/elf64-mips.c.

Irix 6 uses some new addressing syntax, like %neg and %gp_rel (see the
loadgp insn in gcc/config/mips/mips.md).  I don't think gas recognizes
those.

There may be some new pseudo-ops on Irix 6 which gas does not
recognize.

I think that in strict -o32 mode, gas already sort of works on Irix 6,
although it generates .mdebug information which is appropriate for
Irix 5 but not for Irix 6.  Unfortunately, the last time I checked gcc
did not support -o32 mode on Irix 6, so this isn't much help.

Since a lot of the code does exist in one form or another, I don't
think an Irix 6 port would be exceptionally difficult.  However, it
would not be trivial.  I would certainly be grateful if somebody
volunteered to do one.  I am not aware of anybody working on an Irix 6
port at present.

Note that there is a mailing list specifically for the discussion of
gas: gas2@cygnus.com (to join, gas2-request@cygnus.com, as usual).
It's low volume.

Ian

Re: SGI IRIX 6.4 & gas

[Jim Wilson]

	    You must not use GAS on irix6 platforms; doing so will only cause
	    problems. 

	Is the prohibition in the docs still correct?

yes.

	If so, does anyone recall the specific problem; it might be
	worth it to me to fix it.

GNU as hasn't been ported to Irix6 yet.  This involves adding support for
new assembler syntax, new command line options, new object file formats, etc.
There is a lot of stuff that is different at the assembler level (from Irix5),
and there is a non-trivial amount of work needed to fix this.

Jim