[PATCH v3 00/18] PR ld/24600: Add general linker support for mapless archives

[Maciej W. Rozycki]

On Thu, 20 Nov 2025, Hans-Peter Nilsson wrote:

> >  I have now investigated and fixed the issue originally triggered by v1 
> > for the `cris*-*-*' target related to commit c1a7d039587b ("cris: bfd: 
> > Default selected target to the configured target").  The CRIS targets 
> > turned out to be the only ones that make use of the multiple emulation 
> > support in GAS for dislike target object formats (the only other target 
> > that makes use of the feature is MIPS, but nowadays only as an alternative 
> > way to choose the endianness between otherwise ELF formats), so I made it 
> > the basis for new tests to verify generic BFD support for switching the 
> > emulation where archives are involved, as with other targets extra messing 
> > with `objcopy' would be required to change the format of
> > assembly output.
> 
> Oh, the burden... 1/2 :)  Seriously, you really went above
> and beyond with this patchset.

 Thank you for the kind words.  Always appreciated.

> My only worry is that, as mentioned before, I'd like to move
> cris*-*-* away from using the gas emulation feature, and
> also to deprecate cris-aout (for gas).  Not that I've
> noticed (other) problems though; curiously, making use of
> the otherwise unused machinery hasn't been much of a hassle,
> and nowhere near the top of my TODO list.  The only one
> recent enough to stick to my memory is having to update gcc
> when for gas, "--em" no longer was a valid short-form for
> "--emulation".

 It has turned out that the CRIS target is special in a positive way in 
that it is the only remaining one that exercises certain flexibility paths 
in BFD and GAS.  So while I cannot request you to keep parts of code you 
have taken responsibility for that cause you maintenance burden, I will 
appreciate if you do not hurry discarding them as they are useful to 
verify generic parts of BFD that are otherwise hard to trigger.

 Yeah, I do remember seeing the discussion on "--em" vs "--emulation".

> The patchset is ok for cris*-*, thanks.

 Thank you for your review.

  Maciej