[PATCH] Fix distinction of 32/64bit addresses in MIPS gas

[cgd@broadcom.com]

"H . J . Lu" <hjl@lucon.org> writes:
> Here is the thing. "make check" in binutils doesn't do much on
> NetBSD/mips. It also used to be the case for Linux/mips until I turned
> on them for Linux/mips. I also added a few new mips testcases. Quite
> a few serious mips bugs have been identified/fixed since then. 

Oh, I understand that.  The problem becomes, what's a bug and what's
a feature?  8-)

Yes, something might be a bug w.r.t. an ABI standard that nobody
started following until 6 months ago.  But e.g. some of the changes to
binutils will cause binary compatibility for NetBSD/mips binaries,
which have been using the old MIPS ELF ABI implemented by binutils for
... 3+ years.

I don't disagree that bugs need to be fixed, but some of the fixes
will cause some groups real pain.

(No, there's no real point there.  8-)


> Without
> active participation from NetBSD/mips, we have no idea if the current
> toolchain works, which also include gcc and gdb, on NetBSD/mips or not.

Agreed.  I've advocated for ... years that NetBSD should do Better
Things than it historically has, w.r.t. toolchain stuff.

But i'm not really in a position to do them myself since for the most
part I'm not paid to work on NetBSD and I have limited time outside of
work for such hacking.

It's getting better, but is a long way from good.


> The only mips testsuite results for gcc I can find are Irix and Linux.
> It won't surprise me that the next release of gcc/binutils won't work
> on NetBSD/mips, out of box.

GCC isn't relevant here, is it?  I mean, binutils is supposed to be a
usable compiler with gcc, without gcc, and also with random
(not-current) versions of gcc.  NetBSD is ... much less likely to
upgrade to a new version of gcc than to a new version of binutils.

Indeed, it's almost certain that the next release of binutils won't
work on NetBSD/mips.  Even if the trivial things were fixed (and they
could be, and i plan to work on them to the extent that I can),
there's still this non-trivial (to my eyes, at least) ABI change.


The point of my message was mostly informational: i think the list
should be aware that there are issues re: MIPS ABIs, current binutils,
and compatibility with a system that's been using binutils to generate
dynamically-linked MIPS ELF binaries for years.

It's going to crop up again in the future, and I thought i'd put
something down on record so that when it does people would have
something to look at.  8-)



chris