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RE: Commit: Improve GAS testsuite results for various targets
- From: "Maciej W. Rozycki" <macro at imgtec dot com>
- To: Matthew Fortune <Matthew dot Fortune at imgtec dot com>
- Cc: Nick Clifton <nickc at redhat dot com>, "binutils at sourceware dot org" <binutils at sourceware dot org>
- Date: Wed, 22 Jun 2016 17:33:13 +0100
- Subject: RE: Commit: Improve GAS testsuite results for various targets
- Authentication-results: sourceware.org; auth=none
- References: <87porieapk dot fsf at redhat dot com> <alpine dot DEB dot 2 dot 00 dot 1606211721190 dot 7182 at tp dot orcam dot me dot uk> <ea0a7dcf-c8b6-ec85-2015-96a7d1ddd8b4 at redhat dot com> <6D39441BF12EF246A7ABCE6654B023537E4579F1 at HHMAIL01 dot hh dot imgtec dot org>
On Wed, 22 Jun 2016, Matthew Fortune wrote:
> > Any and all, but I have actually been hoping that a MIPS expert, such as yourself,
> > would fix them for me. :-)
Sure, although I'll appreciate help with sorting out any generic issues
discovered in the course as with my tendency to trigger cascades of
obscure bugs in an exponential manner I'm guaranteed to run out of
resources pretty quickly.
> > It also seems to me that we have an awful lot of different mips targets and I
> > wonder if all of them are still in use. It would be nice if we could start to
> > deprecate some of them...
>
> Perhaps get rid of the non-traditional MIPS targets. i.e. irix and switch mips-elf
> over to traditional. I know it is not much but a bit of cleanup makes MIPS easier
> to get to grips with.
Hmm, I don't think the lone bitrot of the test suite is a sufficient
justification for IRIX target support removal, although it's certainly an
argument in favour to. I'd like to make the test suite clean-ups I have
in mind first before I decide to, they'll make the framework much cleaner
for the targets which by all means we do want to retain. Perhaps there is
something simple and systematic we missed for IRIX there. One issue I've
become aware of is we allowed the ABI flags section/segment to be produced
for IRIX targets, which is something we surely shouldn't have.
As to other non-traditional MIPS targets there are just a handful of
issues and object modules are not (fully) link-compatible between the two
flavours I believe, so I'd rather kept them as they are. Forcing people
to chase old versions of tools just because they need to relink their old
software because of an odd bug found and fixed somewhere is the last thing
I'd like to do. In such cases it usually just adds to frustration from
having to touch it at all in the first place.
FWIW,
Maciej