Problems with linker on Alpha

[Michael Cree]

Richard,

I hope you don't mind an email sent to you personally regarding problems 
with the linker on Alpha (I've also CCed the debian-alpha and binutils 
mail lists).

I've noted some problems with ld on Alpha and am wanting to put some 
effort into fixing them but will need a bit of guidance and assistance.

First off is bug 12608 [1] which I believe I have identified the problem 
and have posted a patch to the bug tracker.  I am hoping that if it is 
acceptable that you can commit it.

Secondly, I noted a number of test suite failures in the ld component 
while building binutils.  Some of them are with plugins which might 
explain why bugs/crashes seem to randomly appear and disappear with 
larger software packages using plugins. I would like to investigate the 
test suite failures but am yet to understand the automated system using 
expect and isolate each test so that I can run them manually.  Are you 
able to give me a bit of guidance on that?

Thirdly, a number of large C++ programs (such as firefox/xulrunner, 
webkit, libreoffice) bomb out with GPREL16 relocation truncation errors 
when using the -relax option but link successfully when using 
--no-relax.  I have reopened bug 5276 [2] which describes this problem. 
  It would be nice to get this problem fixed!

Fourthly, the Debian supplied gcc-4.6 fails to build on Debian because 
of a boostrap comparison failure, so I attempted to build upstream 
gcc-4.6 branch source which got past the bootstrap comparison but failed 
later on with the following error:

/usr/bin/ld: BFD (GNU Binutils for Debian) 2.21.51.20110419 internal 
error, aborting at ../../bfd/elf64-alpha.c line 2064 in 
elf64_alpha_gc_sweep_hook

when linking libstdc++.  This is using the Debian supplied bintuils 
version 2.21.51.20110419-2, also with my patch to fix the TLS issue. 
Maybe I should make a bug entry for it.

So there are a number of issues that I would like to work on but while I 
believe I solved bug 12608 some of the others are more challenging and I 
need some guidance to be able to make (or speed up) progress. I should 
be grateful if you could assist!

Cheers
Michael.

[1] http://sourceware.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=12608
[2] http://sourceware.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=5276