> From: Ralf Baechle <ralf@xxxxxxxxxxx>
>
> On Sat, Feb 26, 2000 at 02:20:46AM -0800, Ulf Carlsson wrote:
>
> > > The situation for userland is different and much more complex. GNU libc
> > > and
> > > other packages do heavily rely on GNU ld's features. Add that GNU ld is
> > > evolving. That makes using anything but GNU ld a no go for userspace.
> >
> > I was talking to Ralf earlier and I mentioned that I thought SGI was going
> > to
> > use the MIPS Pro compiler to compile the Linux that will run on the IA-64
> > SN1
> > machines. I really don't know what's happening with the MIPS Pro compiler
> > nowadays, I've only heard rumours from here and there. If the MIPS Pro
> > compiler is going to be used to compile Linux I assume that the GNU specific
> > features required to compile the GNU libc, such as symbol versioning, will
> > be
> > added, and we can use the features for MIPS as well as IA-64. Does anyone
> > know whether the MIPS Pro compiler for IA-64 will be open sourced or not?
The back-end is going to be open sourced (code generation and optimization),
the front end remains gcc.
See:
http://info.engr.sgi.com/opensrc/proposals/compiler.html
>
> In that context it may make sense to consider compiler, assembler and
> linker as related but not directly dependent parts.
>
> As said GNU ld and binutils are really insane pieces of code. Expressing
> it with Alan Cox's words: ``and yes bfd hacking is like doing sendmail
> configs blind with a belgian keyboard''. And yes, bfd is indeed the
> abreviation for Big Fucking Deal. The alternative expansion Binary File
> Descriptor library was created later on ...
>
> I would really, really hate if we'd use a different assembler and linker
> than all the others Linux architectures. It would still leave us with
> with a broken libbfd which various tools are linked against. The most
> important one of these is GDB and GDB functionality on IRIX already
> suffers a good bit from the brokenness of libbfd on MIPS. I just say
> N32 and 64 ABIs.
>
> As mentioned before people at Cygnus have considered replacing GNU ld
> years ago. Most important to drop everything but ELF support for a
> ld replacement. With that happening and a new ld going into binutils
> libbfd still wouldn't be eleminated. But large parts of it's
> functionality could be eleminated, the complexity by reduced dramatically.
> Result: only winners, at least among the ELF users. So after some
> brain storming I think we should try to convince the other architectures
> that GNU ld is really overdue to be replaced. Probbly little convincing
> required. What we get is hopefully some linker that is maintainable for
> us again.
That makes some sense as a long term strategy, but do you really want to
continue doing battle with binutils until a new loader comes along from
Cygnus?
I didn't think so.
- leo
>
> Ralf
>
Leo Dagum SGI Mountain View, CA 94043 (650-933-2179)
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