Re: Obsoleting IRIX < 6.5, Solaris 7, and Tru64 UNIX < V5.1

[Richard Sandiford <rdsandiford at googlemail dot com>]

Rainer Orth <ro@CeBiTec.Uni-Bielefeld.DE> writes:
> * IRIX before 6.5:
>
> ** IRIX 5.3 entered retired mode by the end of 1998.  Patches are no
>    longer available from support.sgi.com, and a full bootstrap and test
>    cycle takes 8 1/2 days on the machines I have available, even without
>    java/libgcj. 
>
> ** IRIX 6.2 entered retired mode by 01/2003 and patches aren't available
>    either.  I don't have any machine available running that version.
>
> ** IRIX 6.3 and 6.4 were only ever released for specific hardware.
>
> ** With a few exceptions, all machines supported by IRIX 6.[2-4] are
>    supported by IRIX 6.5, too (at least until 6.5.22).

Sounds like a good plan ;)

> ** I also consider obsoleting support for the O32 ABI: the SGI linker used
>    is different from the N32/N64 ld, and has repeatedly caused problems
>    which couldn't be resolved even when SGI still had full IRIX
>    support.  Also, the ISO C99 support in libc is only available for the
>    N32 and N64 ABIs.

Yeah, that's a difficult one.  On the one hand, I can see that it
doesn't make sense to support an ABI that was there for compatibility
with IRIX 5 and earlier (which we're declaring obselete).  On the other,
I think o32 worked better with the GNU linker than it did with the
SGI linker.  E.g. I remember hitting GOT overflow problems with the
SGI o32 linker (which didn't support multiple GOTs) that were solved
by using the GNU linker.

But that was a long time ago (binutils 2.15?) and I don't know how
well it works now.  And I still can't see any reason why IRIX 6.5
users would prefer o32 over n32.  I certainly don't object to
removing o32 support from the IRIX port.

Richard