Re: RFA: Recording MIPS ABI selection in binaries

[cgd at sibyte dot com (Chris G. Demetriou)]

Andrew Cagney <ac131313@cygnus.com> writes:
> Richard Henderson wrote:
> > 
> > On Tue, Aug 08, 2000 at 06:49:10PM -0700, Chris G. Demetriou wrote:
> > > And what purpose is there in expressing that a binary uses exactly one
> > > ISA's/CPU's type of instructions, i.e. why should it be encoded the
> > > way it is?  Use of an ISA is not exclusive; you can use multiple ISAs
> > > in a single executable, with (strongly desirable) good effect.
> > 
> > Actually, this brings up a good point: perhaps this ought to be
> > done per compilation unit rather than for the entire binary.
> 
> N'kay.  It would definitly help GDB/objdumps abilities to dissamble
> correctly.

The two questions i have about this are:

* should it even be compilation unit granularity?  It seems that a
mechanism for finer granularity would be appropriate, since certainly
it's possible to use different ISA assembly at finer granularity than
that, if you're coding in assembly.  (The compiler would only use it
at compilation unit granularity.)

* is it actually easy for objdump to make use of debugging
information?


(it seems to me that debugging information is as good as random named
sections, since in some ways the latter _are_ debugging information
for completely linked ELF binaries anyway -- loaders should be
ignoring them in favor of the PHDRs. 8-)



chris