binutils is broken on ELF/mips (Re: binutils is broken on Linux/alpha)

[H . J . Lu]

On Fri, Oct 05, 2001 at 12:36:51PM +0930, Alan Modra wrote:
> H.J.,
>   Please try this kludge.  In future, it would be a lot more useful if

I will give it a try.

> you post some details of your failing test cases, even if that is only
> "compiling current glibc for ..., I get a failure in ..".  That way, I
> and others will get a better feel for the problem, and can at least test
> any work-arounds.
> 

I don't have any small testcase. I caught the bug by rebuilding my
mips port of RedHat 7.1. I can cross rebuild the whole thing by

# make clobber
# make

after installing the new binutils.


H.J.
---
My mini-port of RedHat 7.1 is at

ftp://oss.sgi.com/pub/linux/mips/redhat/7.1/

you should be able to put a small RedHat 7.1 on the mips/mipsel box and
compile the rest of RedHat 7.1 yourselves.

Here are something you should know:

1. The cross compiler hosted on RedHat 7.1/ia32 is provided as a
toolchain rpm. The binary rpms for the mips and mipsel cross compilers
are included. You will need glibc 2.2.3-11 or above to use those
rpms. The glibc x86 binary rpms under RPMS/i386 should be ok.
2. You have to find a way to put those rpms on your machine. I use
network boot and NFS root to do it.
3. install.tar.bz2 has some scripts to prepare NFS root and install
RedHat 7.1 on a hard drive.
4. baseline.tar.bz2 contains the cross build tree.
5. Since everything is cross compiled from x86, which is little endian,
many data files for mips, which is big endian, are either missing or
wrong. To get those data files for mips, you have to rebuild/install
the folowing rpms:

cracklib
glibc

natively on Linux/mips.

Thanks.


H.J.