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Re: 3.4 PATCH: Fix minor IRIX 5 problems
Eric Christopher writes:
> OK. I'm amazed at the work you've done for native as/ld support. Any
> reason you aren't using gas/gld by default?
a couple of reasons:
* I'm generally reluctant to force GCC users to GNU as/ld if the vendor
tools mostly work. There are often cases for non-GNU/Linux platforms
where they even work better and have features missing from their binutils
equivalents.
* gas 2.14.90 alone didn't work with the native ld: gas supports named
sections, but SGI ld aborts if it finds any but a couple of known
sections ;-( SGI's Dave Anderson provided the necessary clue as to what
was wrong.
* gld 2.14.90 didn't work for me at first: it claimed it couldn't find -lc
(i.e. /usr/lib/libc.so). This turned out to be a pilot error after some
serious debugging: I had still passed -no_unresolved to gld, but it
didn't understand this option which got silently interpreted as -n
-o_unresolved (it seems), so dynamic linking was disabled ;-(
* Even with this resolved, bootstrap with both gas/gld fails at the moment:
at least with stabs, gas embeds the temporary assembler input filename
into the object file. I'll have to check why it does this nonsense: I've
never encountered this with gas 2.14.90 configured for mips-sgi-irix6.5
for the O32 ABI.
So it wasn't much work to get native as/ld working in this case (apart from
the pain of bootstrapping on a machine with only 64 MB RAM), while I had
much trouble with gas/gld.
Rainer
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Rainer Orth, Faculty of Technology, Bielefeld University