Re: 4.0.2/4.1 PATCH: Enforce PIC code for mips libffi (PR libgcj/21943)

[Richard Sandiford <rsandifo at nildram dot co dot uk>]

"Maciej W. Rozycki" <macro@linux-mips.org> writes:
>  I'd suggest changing specs to pass "-KPIC" to gas instead or otherwise 
> you'll have problems with other assembly language sources anyway.  For 
> Linux GCC passes this option to gas unless "-mno-abicalls" is given -- I 
> guess it should work for you as well.  But I'll leave the decision up to 
> the MIPS maintainers.

As so often with MIPS stuff, no-one would have really wanted the
current situation.  Having GAS default to one thing and GCC default
to the opposite is just plain silly.  The problem is, once you have
that silliness, none of the possible ways of resolving it are
"obviously" better than the others.

I agree that your position makes as much sense as can be expected under
the circumstances, but the same is true of the current IRIX situation.
(Which, just to be clear, is that we use assembler directives to select
the kind of code we want.)  I don't see a strong argument for changing
it and I'm inclined to keep things the way they are.  Maybe Eric has a
stronger opinion.

Rainer's patch is correct whether we change the specs or not.
However, gcc -- and the asm files in config/mips/ -- use the
directive ".abicalls" instead of ".option pic2".  I'd prefer
that we do the same here for consistency.  The patch is OK
with that change.

Richard