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Re: [MiNT] strip
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