gas/NEWS

   1 -*- text -*-
   2 Support for the OpenRISC 32-bit embedded processor by OpenCores.
   3
   4 The ARM assembler now accepts -march=..., -mcpu=... and -mfpu=... for
   5 specifying the target instruction set.  The old method of specifying the
   6 target processor has been deprecated, but is still accepted for
   7 compatibility.
   8
   9 Support for the VFP floating-point instruction set has been added to
  10 the ARM assembler.
  11
  12 New psuedo op: .incbin to include a set of binary data at a given point
  13 in the assembly.  Contributed by Anders Norlander.
  14
  15 The MIPS assembler now accepts -march/-mtune. -mcpu has been deprecated
  16 but still works for compatability.
  17
  18 The MIPS assembler no longer issues a warning by default when it
  19 generates a nop instruction from a macro. The new command line option
  20 -n will turn on the warning.
  21
  22 Changes in 2.11:
  23
  24 x86 gas now supports the full Pentium4 instruction set.
  25
  26 Support for AMD x86-64 architecture, by Jan Hubicka, SuSE Labs.
  27
  28 Support for Motorola 68HC11 and 68HC12.
  29
  30 Support for Texas Instruments TMS320C54x (tic54x).
  31
  32 Support for IA-64.
  33
  34 Support for i860, by Jason Eckhardt.
  35
  36 Support for CRIS (Axis Communications ETRAX series).
  37
  38 x86 gas has a new .arch pseudo op to specify the target CPU architecture.
  39
  40 x86 gas -q command line option quietens warnings about register size changes
  41 due to suffix, indirect jmp/call without `*', stand-alone prefixes, and
  42 translating various deprecated floating point instructions.
  43
  44 Changes in 2.10:
  45
  46 Support for the ARM msr instruction was changed to only allow an immediate
  47 operand when altering the flags field.
  48
  49 Support for ATMEL AVR.
  50
  51 Support for IBM 370 ELF.  Somewhat experimental.
  52
  53 Support for numbers with suffixes.
  54
  55 Added support for breaking to the end of repeat loops.
  56
  57 Added support for parallel instruction syntax (DOUBLEBAR_PARALLEL).
  58
  59 New .elseif pseudo-op added.
  60
  61 New --fatal-warnings option.
  62
  63 picoJava architecture support added.
  64
  65 Motorola MCore 210 processor support added.
  66
  67 A new pseudo-op .intel_syntax has been implemented to allow gas to parse i386
  68 assembly programs with intel syntax.
  69
  70 New pseudo-ops .func,.endfunc to aid in debugging user-written assembler code.
  71
  72 Added -gdwarf2 option to generate DWARF 2 debugging information.
  73
  74 Full 16-bit mode support for i386.
  75
  76 Greatly improved instruction operand checking for i386.  This change will
  77 produce errors or warnings on incorrect assembly code that previous versions of
  78 gas accepted.  If you get unexpected messages from code that worked with older
  79 versions of gas, please double check the code before reporting a bug.
  80
  81 Weak symbol support added for COFF targets.
  82
  83 Mitsubishi D30V support added.
  84
  85 Texas Instruments c80 (tms320c80) support added.
  86
  87 i960 ELF support added.
  88
  89 ARM ELF support added.
  90
  91 Changes in 2.9:
  92
  93 Texas Instruments c30 (tms320c30) support added.
  94
  95 The assembler now optimizes the exception frame information generated by egcs
  96 and gcc 2.8.  The new --traditional-format option disables this optimization.
  97
  98 Added --gstabs option to generate stabs debugging information.
  99
 100 The -a option takes a new suboption, m (e.g., -alm) to expand macros in a
 101 listing.
 102
 103 Added -MD option to print dependencies.
 104
 105 Changes in 2.8:
 106
 107 BeOS support added.
 108
 109 MIPS16 support added.
 110
 111 Motorola ColdFire 5200 support added (configure for m68k and use -m5200).
 112
 113 Alpha/VMS support added.
 114
 115 m68k options --base-size-default-16, --base-size-default-32,
 116 --disp-size-default-16, and --disp-size-default-32 added.
 117
 118 The alignment directives now take an optional third argument, which is the
 119 maximum number of bytes to skip.  If doing the alignment would require skipping
 120 more than the given number of bytes, the alignment is not done at all.
 121
 122 The ELF assembler has a new pseudo-op, .symver, used for symbol versioning.
 123
 124 The -a option takes a new suboption, c (e.g., -alc), to skip false conditionals
 125 in listings.
 126
 127 Added new pseudo-op, .equiv; it's like .equ, except that it is an error if the
 128 symbol is already defined.
 129
 130 Changes in 2.7:
 131
 132 The PowerPC assembler now allows the use of symbolic register names (r0, etc.)
 133 if -mregnames is used.  Symbolic names preceded by a '%' (%r0, etc.) can be
 134 used any time.  PowerPC 860 move to/from SPR instructions have been added.
 135
 136 Alpha Linux (ELF) support added.
 137
 138 PowerPC ELF support added.
 139
 140 m68k Linux (ELF) support added.
 141
 142 i960 Hx/Jx support added.
 143
 144 i386/PowerPC gnu-win32 support added.
 145
 146 SCO ELF support added.  For OpenServer 5 targets (i386-unknown-sco3.2v5) the
 147 default is to build COFF-only support.  To get a set of tools that generate ELF
 148 (they'll understand both COFF and ELF), you must configure with
 149 target=i386-unknown-sco3.2v5elf.
 150
 151 m88k-motorola-sysv3* support added.
 152
 153 Changes in 2.6:
 154
 155 Gas now directly supports macros, without requiring GASP.
 156
 157 Gas now has an MRI assembler compatibility mode.  Use -M or --mri to select MRI
 158 mode.  The pseudo-op ``.mri 1'' will switch into the MRI mode until the ``.mri
 159 0'' is seen; this can be convenient for inline assembler code.
 160
 161 Added --defsym SYM=VALUE option.
 162
 163 Added -mips4 support to MIPS assembler.
 164
 165 Added PIC support to Solaris and SPARC SunOS 4 assembler.
 166
 167 Changes in 2.4:
 168
 169 Converted this directory to use an autoconf-generated configure script.
 170
 171 ARM support, from Richard Earnshaw.
 172
 173 Updated VMS support, from Pat Rankin, including considerably improved debugging
 174 support.
 175
 176 Support for the control registers in the 68060.
 177
 178 Handles (ignores) a new directive ".this_GCC_requires_the_GNU_assembler", to
 179 provide for possible future gcc changes, for targets where gas provides some
 180 features not available in the native assembler.  If the native assembler is
 181 used, it should become obvious pretty quickly what the problem is.
 182
 183 Usage message is available with "--help".
 184
 185 The GNU Assembler Preprocessor (gasp) is included.  (Actually, it was in 2.3
 186 also, but didn't get into the NEWS file.)
 187
 188 Weak symbol support for a.out.
 189
 190 A bug in the listing code which could cause an infinite loop has been fixed.
 191 Bugs in listings when generating a COFF object file have also been fixed.
 192
 193 Initial i386-svr4 PIC implementation from Eric Youngdale, based on code by Paul
 194 Kranenburg.
 195
 196 Improved Alpha support.  Immediate constants can have a much larger range now.
 197 Support for the 21164 has been contributed by Digital.
 198
 199 Updated ns32k (pc532-mach, netbsd532) support from Ian Dall.
 200
 201 Changes in 2.3:
 202
 203 Mach i386 support, by David Mackenzie and Ken Raeburn.
 204
 205 RS/6000 and PowerPC support by Ian Taylor.
 206
 207 VMS command scripts (make-gas.com, config-gas.com) have been worked on a bit,
 208 based on mail received from various people.  The `-h#' option should work again
 209 too.
 210
 211 HP-PA work, by Jeff Law.  Note, for the PA, gas-2.3 has been designed to work
 212 with gdb-4.12 and gcc-2.6.  As gcc-2.6 has not been released yet, a special
 213 version of gcc-2.5.8 has been patched to work with gas-2.3.  You can retrieve
 214 this special version of gcc-2.5.8 via anonymous ftp from jaguar.cs.utah.edu
 215 in the "dist" directory.
 216
 217 Vax support in gas fixed for BSD, so it builds and seems to run a couple simple
 218 tests okay.  I haven't put it through extensive testing.  (GNU make is
 219 currently required for BSD 4.3 builds.)
 220
 221 Support for the DEC Alpha, running OSF/1 (ECOFF format).  The gas support is
 222 based on code donated by CMU, which used an a.out-based format.  I'm afraid the
 223 alpha-a.out support is pretty badly mangled, and much of it removed; making it
 224 work will require rewriting it as BFD support for the format anyways.
 225
 226 Irix 5 support.
 227
 228 The test suites have been fixed up a bit, so that they should work with a
 229 couple different versions of expect and dejagnu.
 230
 231 Symbols' values are now handled internally as expressions, permitting more
 232 flexibility in evaluating them in some cases.  Some details of relocation
 233 handling have also changed, and simple constant pool management has been added,
 234 to make the Alpha port easier.
 235
 236 New option "--statistics" for printing out program run times.  This is intended
 237 to be used with the gcc "-Q" option, which prints out times spent in various
 238 phases of compilation.  (You should be able to get all of them printed out with
 239 "gcc -Q -Wa,--statistics", I think.)
 240
 241 ----------------------------------------------------------------
 242
 243 Changes in 2.2:
 244
 245 RS/6000 AIX and MIPS SGI Irix 5 support has been added.
 246
 247 Configurations that are still in development (and therefore are convenient to
 248 have listed in configure.in) still get rejected without a minor change to
 249 gas/Makefile.in, so people not doing development work shouldn't get the
 250 impression that support for such configurations is actually believed to be
 251 reliable.
 252
 253 The program name (usually "as") is printed when a fatal error message is
 254 displayed.  This should prevent some confusion about the source of occasional
 255 messages about "internal errors".
 256
 257 ELF support is falling into place.  Support for the 386 should be working.
 258 Support for SPARC Solaris is in.  HPPA support from Utah is being integrated.
 259
 260 Symbol values are maintained as expressions instead of being immediately boiled
 261 down to add-symbol, sub-symbol, and constant.  This permits slightly more
 262 complex calculations involving symbols whose values are not alreadey known.
 263
 264 DBX-style debugging info ("stabs") is now supported for COFF formats.
 265 If any stabs directives are seen in the source, GAS will create two new
 266 sections: a ".stab" and a ".stabstr" section.  The format of the .stab
 267 section is nearly identical to the a.out symbol format, and .stabstr is
 268 its string table.  For this to be useful, you must have configured GCC
 269 to generate stabs (by defining DBX_DEBUGGING_INFO), and must have a GDB
 270 that can use the stab sections (4.11 or later).
 271
 272 LynxOS, on i386 and m68k platforms, is now supported.  SPARC LynxOS
 273 support is in progress.
 274
 275 ----------------------------------------------------------------
 276
 277 Changes in 2.1:
 278
 279 Several small fixes for i386-aix (PS/2) support from Minh Tran-Le have been
 280 incorporated, but not well tested yet.
 281
 282 Altered the opcode table split for m68k; it should require less VM to compile
 283 with gcc now.
 284
 285 Some minor adjustments to add (Convergent Technologies') Miniframe support,
 286 suggested by Ronald Cole.
 287
 288 HPPA support (running OSF only, not HPUX) has been contributed by Utah.  This
 289 includes improved ELF support, which I've started adapting for SPARC Solaris
 290 2.x.  Integration isn't completely, so it probably won't work.
 291
 292 HP9000/300 support, donated by HP, has been merged in.
 293
 294 Ian Taylor has finished the MIPS ECOFF (Ultrix, Irix) support.
 295
 296 Better error messages for unsupported configurations (e.g., hppa-hpux).
 297
 298 Test suite framework is starting to become reasonable.
 299
 300 ----------------------------------------------------------------
 301
 302 Changes in 2.0:
 303
 304 Mostly bug fixes.
 305
 306 Some more merging of BFD and ELF code, but ELF still doesn't work.
 307
 308 ----------------------------------------------------------------
 309
 310 Changes in 1.94:
 311
 312 BFD merge is partly done.  Adventurous souls may try giving configure the
 313 "--with-bfd-assembler" option.  Currently, ELF format requires it, a.out format
 314 accepts it; SPARC CPU accepts it.  It's the default only for OS "elf" or
 315 "solaris".  (ELF isn't really supported yet.  It needs work.  I've got some
 316 code from Utah for HP-PA ELF, and from DG for m88k ELF, but they're not fully
 317 merged yet.)
 318
 319 The 68K opcode table has been split in half.  It should now compile under gcc
 320 without consuming ridiculous amounts of memory.
 321
 322 A couple data structures have been reduced in size.  This should result in
 323 saving a little bit of space at runtime.
 324
 325 Support for MIPS, from OSF and Ralph Campbell, has been merged in.  The OSF
 326 code provided ROSE format support, which I haven't merged in yet.  (I can make
 327 it available, if anyone wants to try it out.)  Ralph's code, for BSD 4.4,
 328 supports a.out format.  We don't have ECOFF support in just yet; it's coming.
 329
 330 Support for the Hitachi H8/500 has been added.
 331
 332 VMS host and target support should be working now, thanks chiefly to Eric
 333 Youngdale.
 334
 335 ----------------------------------------------------------------
 336
 337 Changes in 1.93.01:
 338
 339 For m68k, support for more processors has been added: 68040, CPU32, 68851.
 340
 341 For i386, .align is now power-of-two; was number-of-bytes.
 342
 343 For m68k, "%" is now accepted before register names.  For COFF format, which
 344 doesn't use underscore prefixes for C labels, it is required, so variable "a0"
 345 can be distinguished from the register.
 346
 347 Last public release was 1.38.  Lots of configuration changes since then, lots
 348 of new CPUs and formats, lots of bugs fixed.
 349
 350 \f
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