Binutils on arm : pls advice me how to proceed

[Pedro Alves]

Nick Clifton wrote:
> Hi Pedro, Hi Danny,
>
>   Please accept my apologies in taking so long to reply to your 
> emails.  I have now had a chance to go over them and the patches that 
> they contained and then seemed quite reasonable to me.  I have applied 
> them to my local source tree and checked to see if there were any 
> regressions  - there were not.
>
>   Unfortunately I do not have an arm-wince system at my disposal, so I 
> cannot check that the (slightly revised) versions of the patches that 
> I applied allow working binaries to be created, so please can I ask 
> for your help ?
>
>   I am attaching a unified patch which I think contains all of the 
> changes that you suggested, along with a little bit of code tidying. 
> Please could you try applying them to a set of binutils sources (from 
> the mainline of the CVS repository) and testing them to see if they 
> produce working binaries ?
>
 >  One thing I am quite worried about is whether partial linking will 
work.  (ie using the "ld -r ...." file to create an object file that is 
an amalgam of several other object files).  I suspect that there might 
be problems with the -8 bias to branch relocations, but without a test 
environment I cannot tell for sure.

Made a small test:
Three objects (from main.cpp main2.cpp main3.cpp), one function each, 
each calls the other in chain, and both all -lc functions (printf).

Linked with:

${OUTFILE}.exe : $(OBJECTS) Makefile
    $(CXX) -v main.o main2.o -nostdlib -r -o partial.o
    $(CXX) -v partial.o main3.o -static $(LDFLAGS) -o ${OUTFILE}.exe

Tested with runtime as dll and with -static.
And it ran ok.

>
>   Thanks very much for perserving with your work, and assuming that 
> you can confirm that the patch works, I will be happy to check it in 
> with the ChangeLogs below.
>
Confirmed. Tested with the tests I sent before, and after rebuilding the 
full cegcc toolchain, with some c++ tests apps I have.
Many thanks for taking the time to clean and review the patches, and for 
taking the time to write the ChangeLog.

Cheers,
Pedro Alves