Solaris 7 assembler patch breaks egcs

[John Harper]

On Thu, May 13, 1999 at 06:34:05PM +0200, Martin v. Loewis wrote:
> > As far as I can tell, if the Solaris7 assembler patch 107058 is
> > installed, then the compiler built using that version of as is badly
> > broken. The C compiler isn't too bad, it will compile many things ok,
> > but not X11R6.4. The C++ compiler is bust - it can't even compile a
> > hello world program, and the testsuite had 653 unexpected errors.
> 
> Can you please elaborate? I get always confused when trying to
> understand what the state of egcs on Solaris 7 is. Is it true that you
> could chose between 32bit and 64bit targets on Solaris7? If so, which
> did you chose?

Solaris7 can run 32bit and 64bit apps (on the proper hardware), but I
didn't make any specific request, since from reading elsewhere and as
you noted below egcs does not seem to be ready to support 64bit
apps. I don't know how to select between these targets and don't
really care as long as the 32bit apps work.

I was having problems with gcc 2.8.1 trying to compile
X11R6.4. Initially, I could compile everything in X11, but trying to
compile the Xaw3d library, or the colour xterm (xtermc) caused
problems. I then applied a number of patches to the system, including
loader patches and the scary 107058.

I then recompiled everything starting with gcc, and added debugging to
X11. All kinds of things broke, but looking with gdb I could see that
some addresses appeared to be getting their high bits cleared, putting
them out of the valid VM space and causing seg faults. On a hunch I
removed 107058 and redid everything - it all worked fine (including
Xaw3d and xtermc - suggesting that some of the other patches were
helpful).

I then moved to egcs and repeated the experiment, with the same
results. So egcs/gcc and the patched assembler don't get along.
I know that assembler is supposed to be used only on a 64bit system,
but mine is (even if egcs is ready for that yet) so I assumed that it
would properly generate 32bit apps. 

> 
> I always use GNU binutils together with egcs on Solaris 2.5 and
> Solaris 2.6. Would that approach break on Solaris 7?

It should be ok, with a working compiler...

> 
> Dave Miller repeatedly stated that he doesn't consider egcs ready for
> 64 bit stuff, mainly because of floating point problems. I just can't
> understand why you can't even use it for 32 bit stuff...
> 
> Curious,
> Martin

Hope this helps

John