[PATCH 4/8] bfd/ELF: fold BFD_RELOC_<arch>_GOTOFF*

[Michael Matz]

Hello,

On Sat, 14 Mar 2026, Hans-Peter Nilsson wrote:

> > On 3/13/2026 10:54 AM, Jan Beulich wrote:
> > > For many of the cases there's no need to have separate relocs per arch;
> > > just like for other more or less generic ones a single one (per purpose;
> > > a 64-bit generic one is being introduced) will do. Arm64, C-Sky, and
> > > KVX - sadly - continue to be exceptions.
> > 
> > Hello Jan, hopefully you don't mind my perhaps newbie question:
> > 
> > Isn't the removal of e.g. BFD_RELOC_390_GOTOFF64 breaking the existing
> > external BFD API?  At least all of these relocations are documented in
> > the BFD documentation:
> > https://sourceware.org/binutils/docs/bfd.html#index-BFD_005fRELOC_005f390_005fGOTOFF64
> 
> Of course not; if it had been part of an important external ABI, 
> there would have been coverage in the binutils testsuite and Jan 
> would have noticed that way.
> 
> (Yes, that was tongue-in-cheek and all that, just hoping to make 
> a certain point wrt. test-case importance, and FAOD not directed 
> at neither you nor Jan.)

There never was an "existing external BFD API".  All non-binutils users of 
libbfd are on their own.  If we ever wanted to change that we'd have to 
start with the function signatures and which of them are exported from the 
shared libbfd.  We never did that and would seem strange if we started 
with such effort with constants for relocations.


Ciao,
Michael.