Re: for 3.4-bi 20021213 (experimental) testsuite on

[Steve Ellcey <sje at cup dot hp dot com>]

> Then, I presume that 3.4 will not build on ia64-hpux because the code
> from the test appears in profile.c.  I think there was an intent in the
> ELF standard to define the behavior of undefined weak symbols in that
> they defined that the value of undefined weak symbols should be zero.
> That's in fact what we currently have in the hppa64 implementation with
> GNU ld.  However, the standard doesn't appear to define how the runtime
> should handle an undefined weak symbol.

That is possible, I haven't tried 3.4.

> I can understand that HP might take the position that you indicated.
> However, I think they should carefully consider the advantages of adopting
> the behavior present in many other sysv elf systems, namely that is
> possible to overload a different capability by simply linking with a
> different library.  This can avoid having to use a multilib environment
> for posix threads, etc.  We have been hung up in how to implement posix
> thread support in hpux11 in part because of this issue.  I don't really
> want to multilib both dce and posix threads.

I can pass this info on.

> > I made some changes on IA64 so that functions that are declared but
> > never used are not required.  I did this by not putting out extern's for
> > them unless I see a use.  See ia64_asm_output_external (with
> > TARGET_HPUX_LD set to true), ia64_hpux_add_extern_decl, and
> > ia64_hpux_asm_file_end in config/ia64 for this solution.  I have a
> > version for PA that I could submit.
> 
> Do you have an example where there was a problem?  I suspect that we
> don't have a problem on hppa64-hpux because the GNU and HP assemblers
> discard extern's (IMPORTs) that aren't used.  There was some discussion
> of this on binutils not long ago when a problem related to this arose on
> hppa-linux.  If we actually have a problem, I would appreciate your
> patch.

Hm, maybe it was just a problem with the IA64 assembler.  I'll look at
it, but probably not until after the New Year, I'm just about out of
here for some vacation.  I mentioned it because I thought it might be 
related but it sounds like it is a completely seperate issue.

Steve Ellcey
sje@cup.hp.com