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

[Richard Guenther]

On Sat, Jan 30, 2010 at 4:28 PM, Ian Lance Taylor <iant@google.com> wrote:
> Richard Sandiford <rdsandiford@googlemail.com> writes:
>
>>> ** 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.
>
> I agree with removing support for o32 from the Irix port.
>
> However, it would not surprise me to discover that there are embedded
> systems out there still using o32, with assembly functions which
> expect the o32 calling convention.  I would be cautious about removing
> support for o32 entirely.

I wouldn't be surprised if they're stuck with using GCC 3.x either ;)

Richard.