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Re: Target-specific FDE pointer sizes (2/3)
Nick Clifton <nickc@redhat.com> writes:
> Hi Richard,
>> As with the bfd patch, we need to distinguish between the official
>> LP64 ABI and the not-so-official ILP32 variant. In the case of bfd,
>> it was important that we get the size right, and we had to punt if
>> we weren't sure. In the case of readelf, I think we just want a
>> "best guess", since we have to output _something_.
>
> I think that if readelf has to guess it should inform the user that it
> is doing so. That way the user has a chance to realise that readelf
> might have guessed incorrectly and that is why its output does not match
> their expectations.
Any chance of persuading you otherwise? ;) Three reasons:
- It doesn't seem very useful to print a warning if the user has no
way of overriding the guess. If we do warn about this, I suppose
we'd also have to add a MIPS-EABI64-specific command-line option
to readelf, and like I said in my original posting, I'd really
rather not do that. There's certainly no precedent with the
existing options.
- I don't want to warn about unmarked LP64 objects since there's
nothing suspect about them. They do exactly what the official
ABI said they should do.
- People only ended up with unmarked ILP32 objects through using an
undocumented combination of gcc command-line options. I think
it's reasonable for tools like readelf (and gdb, etc.) to treat
EABI objects as being ABI-conforming without any evidence to
the contrary.
Richard