binutils 2.7 or 2.8 for powerPC

[Ola Liljedahl]

Bob Harmon wrote:
> 
> We've got binutils2.7 working for powerpc
> with gcc2.7.2 but...
> 
> I dont find anything in the binutils doc directory relating to
> powerpc specific issues.  
> 
> It just says that gcc follows the standard conventions for all processors
> so I guess that I'll have to find those in the PPC specifications at 
> motorola.com.  Does that sound reasonable?
> 
AFAIK there are three ABI's (conventions) for PowerPC:
the AIX ABI (using COFF),
the System V ABI (using ELF)
and it's descendant the Embedded ABI (EABI) (using ELF)

We use the Diab PowerPC compiler and it adheres to the EABI.
We have also used gcc with Diab compiled objects and archives
and they were compatible (well it was me who compiled gcc and
binutils for powerpc cross specifying powerpc-unknown-eabi).

I believe the following documents can be found somewhere on the
web (also somewhere on my hard disks but that seems much more
difficult at the moment):
the System V ABI specification from ATT (?)
the PowerPC supplement to the above from Sun (from their Solaris port)
the Embedded ABI specification

These documents says a lot about register conventions, stack frames,
parameter passing, shared libraries, object formats etc.

Now, was this meta information what you really where looking for?

By the way, we had to make one bug fix in the 2.7 BFD library
(in binutils) to make it work as expected (i.e. together with Diab). 
And we haven't submitted that patch to any binutils developers, shame
on us. I shall check if it is fixed in binutils 2.8.
-- 
	Ola Liljedahl
	olli@enea.se
	Enea OSE Systems AB