new gas directives with precise control over endian & size

[Alan Modra]

On Wed, Jan 13, 2021 at 07:05:08PM -0500, Mike Frysinger via Binutils wrote:
> tl;dr: i want gas directives with precise size/endian control for data
> 
> i have a situation where i need to embed some little endian data, and
> always use little endian regardless of the target's endianness.  i'm a
> little (but not much tbh) surprised by gas's limited directives.

I'd be choosing a well supported gas target that already does
little-endian and assemble your object file using that target.

[snip]
> somewhat related, should we promote the ELF .[248]byte directives to
> work for all targets ?  there's nothing ELF specific with them ...
> they call the same exact common code as e.g. .short.  that would give
> us precise size control while being target endian dependent.

Yes, I've thought about doing this myself.

> any thoughts/feedback before i actually implement this ?

Fixups in gas are going to be a problem, unless you only allow
expressions that can be resolved at the point they appear.

-- 
Alan Modra
Australia Development Lab, IBM