From mint-bounce@lists.fishpool.fi Tue Feb 5 08:11:58 2008 Message-ID: <47A85ECA.1040307@freesbee.fr> Date: Tue, 05 Feb 2008 14:04:10 +0100 From: =?ISO-8859-1?Q?Vincent_Rivi=E8re?= User-Agent: Thunderbird 2.0.0.9 (Windows/20071031) MIME-Version: 1.0 To: mint Subject: Re: [MiNT] strip References: <47A732CA.9000803@freesbee.fr> In-Reply-To: Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed X-ecartis-version: Ecartis v1.0.0 Sender: mint-bounce@lists.fishpool.fi Errors-to: mint-bounce@lists.fishpool.fi X-original-sender: vincent.riviere@freesbee.fr Precedence: bulk List-help: List-unsubscribe: List-Id: X-List-ID: List-subscribe: List-owner: List-post: Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit X-MIME-Autoconverted: from quoted-printable to 8bit by mail.sparemint.org id m15DBw5m032024 Frank Naumann wrote: > From the things I heard on the mailinglist, are the > binutils 2.18 stable and work together with gcc 2.95? If yes we can > easily update just the binutils. Then there is no conflict at all :-) Yes, binutils 2.18 seems stable, there is no known problem with them. GCC 2.95 works fine with it. I would be very happy if binutils 2.18 is adopted as the official MiNT version. However, I made 2 important things in the 2.18 patch. They need some discussion before it can be widely used. 1) Alignment. GCC 2.95 (and current GCC 4.2.3) have a default alignment of 2 bytes. However, binutils 2.13 have a default alignment of 4 bytes. I configured binutils 2.18 for a default alignement of 2, in order to be consistent with GCC. It works perfectly, no byte is wasted. However, that default alignment of 2 might not be the best choice for our platform. That's why I opened a new thread about alignment some time ago. Now I will have more time to continue that discussion. 2) Object file format. gas-2.13 uses the format a.out-mint for .o files. That format has nothing special: it is a standard a.out format for m68k. Because that format (actually, only the name) is not supported by the official binutils, they ave to be patched for supporting it. In binutils 2.18, I didn't include the patch for the a.out-mint format. Instead, I used the format a.out-zero-big which has the very same characteristics, and which is natively supported by the binutils. These 2 formats are binary compatible (the binaries are the same). I reported yesterday a successful build of Quake, with the Quake objects in a.out-zero-big format (produced by the cross gas-2.18) and the libc.a in a.out-mint format (from the Sparemint binaries). The advantage of not using a.out-mint is to avoid unnecessary non-standard patching. This change seems good, but it needs the opinion of more people. A new thread should be opened for that. When these 2 questions are answered, binutils 2.18 will be ready for release ! -- Vincent Rivière