gas/NEWS

   1 -*- text -*-
   2
   3 * Support for ms2 architecture has been added.
   4
   5 * Support for the Z80 processor family has been added.
   6
   7 * Add support for the "@<file>" syntax to the command line, so that extra
   8   switches can be read from <file>.
   9
  10 * The SH target supports a new command line switch --enable-reg-prefix which,
  11   if enabled, will allow register names to be optionally prefixed with a $
  12   character.  This allows register names to be distinguished from label names.
  13
  14 * Macros with a variable number of arguments are now supported. See the
  15   documentation for how this works.
  16
  17 * Added --reduce-memory-overheads switch to reduce the size of the hash
  18   tables used, at the expense of longer assembly times, and
  19   --hash-size=<NUMBER> to set the size of the hash tables used by gas.
  20
  21 * Macro names and macro parameter names can now be any identifier that would
  22   also be legal as a symbol elsewhere. For macro parameter names, this is
  23   known to cause problems in certain sources when the respective target uses
  24   characters inconsistently, and thus macro parameter references may no longer
  25   be recognized as such (see the documentation for details).
  26
  27 * Support the .f_floating, .d_floating, .g_floating and .h_floating directives
  28   for the VAX target in order to be more compatible with the VAX MACRO
  29   assembler.
  30
  31 * New command line option -mtune=[itanium1|itanium2] for IA64 targets.
  32
  33 Changes in 2.16:
  34
  35 * Redefinition of macros now results in an error.
  36
  37 * New command line option -mhint.b=[ok|warning|error] for IA64 targets.
  38
  39 * New command line option -munwind-check=[warning|error] for IA64
  40   targets.
  41
  42 * The IA64 port now uses automatic dependency violation removal as its default
  43   mode.
  44
  45 * Port to MAXQ processor contributed by HCL Tech.
  46
  47 * Added support for generating unwind tables for ARM ELF targets.
  48
  49 * Add a -g command line option to generate debug information in the target's
  50   preferred debug format.
  51
  52 * Support for the crx-elf target added.
  53
  54 * Support for the sh-symbianelf target added.
  55
  56 * Added a pseudo-op (.secrel32) to generate 32 bit section relative relocations
  57   on pe[i]-i386; required for this target's DWARF 2 support.
  58
  59 * Support for Motorola MCF521x/5249/547x/548x added.
  60
  61 * Support for ColdFire EMAC instructions added and Motorola syntax for MAC/EMAC
  62   instrucitons.
  63
  64 * New command line option -mno-shared for MIPS ELF targets.
  65
  66 * New command line option --alternate and pseudo-ops .altmacro and .noaltmacro
  67   added to enter (and leave) alternate macro syntax mode.
  68
  69 Changes in 2.15:
  70
  71 * The MIPS -membedded-pic option (Embedded-PIC code generation) is
  72   deprecated and will be removed in a future release.
  73
  74 * Added PIC m32r Linux (ELF) and support to M32R assembler.
  75
  76 * Added support for ARM V6.
  77
  78 * Added support for sh4a and variants.
  79
  80 * Support for Renesas M32R2 added.
  81
  82 * Limited support for Mapping Symbols as specified in the ARM ELF
  83   specification has been added to the arm assembler.
  84
  85 * On ARM architectures, added a new gas directive ".unreq" that undoes
  86   definitions created by ".req".
  87
  88 * Support for Motorola ColdFire MCF528x added.
  89
  90 * Added --gstabs+ switch to enable the generation of STABS debug format
  91   information with GNU extensions.
  92
  93 * Added support for MIPS64 Release 2.
  94
  95 * Added support for v850e1.
  96
  97 * Added -n switch for x86 assembler.  By default, x86 GAS replaces
  98   multiple nop instructions used for alignment within code sections
  99   with multi-byte nop instructions such as leal 0(%esi,1),%esi.  This
 100   switch disables the optimization.
 101
 102 * Removed -n option from MIPS assembler.  It was not useful, and confused the
 103   existing -non_shared option.
 104
 105 Changes in 2.14:
 106
 107 * Added support for MIPS32 Release 2.
 108
 109 * Added support for Xtensa architecture.
 110
 111 * Support for Intel's iWMMXt processor (an ARM variant) added.
 112
 113 * An assembler test generator has been contributed and an example file that
 114   uses it (gas/testsuite/gas/all/test-gen.c and test-exmaple.c).
 115
 116 * Support for SH2E added.
 117
 118 * GASP has now been removed.
 119
 120 * Support for Texas Instruments TMS320C4x and TMS320C3x series of
 121   DSP's contributed by Michael Hayes and Svein E. Seldal.
 122
 123 * Support for the Ubicom IP2xxx microcontroller added.
 124
 125 Changes in 2.13:
 126
 127 * Support for the Fujitsu FRV architecture added by Red Hat. Models for FR400
 128   and FR500 included.
 129
 130 * Support for DLX processor added.
 131
 132 * GASP has now been deprecated and will be removed in a future release.  Use
 133   the macro facilities in GAS instead.
 134
 135 * GASP now correctly parses floating point numbers. Unless the base is
 136   explicitly specified, they are interpreted as decimal numbers regardless of
 137   the currently specified base.
 138
 139 Changes in 2.12:
 140
 141 * Support for Don Knuth's MMIX, by Hans-Peter Nilsson.
 142
 143 * Support for the OpenRISC 32-bit embedded processor by OpenCores.
 144
 145 * The ARM assembler now accepts -march=..., -mcpu=... and -mfpu=... for
 146   specifying the target instruction set.  The old method of specifying the
 147   target processor has been deprecated, but is still accepted for
 148   compatibility.
 149
 150 * Support for the VFP floating-point instruction set has been added to
 151   the ARM assembler.
 152
 153 * New psuedo op: .incbin to include a set of binary data at a given point
 154   in the assembly.  Contributed by Anders Norlander.
 155
 156 * The MIPS assembler now accepts -march/-mtune. -mcpu has been deprecated
 157   but still works for compatability.
 158
 159 * The MIPS assembler no longer issues a warning by default when it
 160   generates a nop instruction from a macro. The new command line option
 161   -n will turn on the warning.
 162
 163 Changes in 2.11:
 164
 165 * Support for PDP-11 and 2.11BSD a.out format, by Lars Brinkhoff.
 166
 167 * x86 gas now supports the full Pentium4 instruction set.
 168
 169 * Support for AMD x86-64 architecture, by Jan Hubicka, SuSE Labs.
 170
 171 * Support for Motorola 68HC11 and 68HC12.
 172
 173 * Support for Texas Instruments TMS320C54x (tic54x).
 174
 175 * Support for IA-64.
 176
 177 * Support for i860, by Jason Eckhardt.
 178
 179 * Support for CRIS (Axis Communications ETRAX series).
 180
 181 * x86 gas has a new .arch pseudo op to specify the target CPU architecture.
 182
 183 * x86 gas -q command line option quietens warnings about register size changes
 184   due to suffix, indirect jmp/call without `*', stand-alone prefixes, and
 185   translating various deprecated floating point instructions.
 186
 187 Changes in 2.10:
 188
 189 * Support for the ARM msr instruction was changed to only allow an immediate
 190   operand when altering the flags field.
 191
 192 * Support for ATMEL AVR.
 193
 194 * Support for IBM 370 ELF.  Somewhat experimental.
 195
 196 * Support for numbers with suffixes.
 197
 198 * Added support for breaking to the end of repeat loops.
 199
 200 * Added support for parallel instruction syntax (DOUBLEBAR_PARALLEL).
 201
 202 * New .elseif pseudo-op added.
 203
 204 * New --fatal-warnings option.
 205
 206 * picoJava architecture support added.
 207
 208 * Motorola MCore 210 processor support added.
 209
 210 * A new pseudo-op .intel_syntax has been implemented to allow gas to parse i386
 211   assembly programs with intel syntax.
 212
 213 * New pseudo-ops .func,.endfunc to aid in debugging user-written assembler code.
 214
 215 * Added -gdwarf2 option to generate DWARF 2 debugging information.
 216
 217 * Full 16-bit mode support for i386.
 218
 219 * Greatly improved instruction operand checking for i386.  This change will
 220   produce errors or warnings on incorrect assembly code that previous versions
 221   of gas accepted.  If you get unexpected messages from code that worked with
 222   older versions of gas, please double check the code before reporting a bug.
 223
 224 * Weak symbol support added for COFF targets.
 225
 226 * Mitsubishi D30V support added.
 227
 228 * Texas Instruments c80 (tms320c80) support added.
 229
 230 * i960 ELF support added.
 231
 232 * ARM ELF support added.
 233
 234 Changes in 2.9:
 235
 236 * Texas Instruments c30 (tms320c30) support added.
 237
 238 * The assembler now optimizes the exception frame information generated by egcs
 239   and gcc 2.8.  The new --traditional-format option disables this optimization.
 240
 241 * Added --gstabs option to generate stabs debugging information.
 242
 243 * The -a option takes a new suboption, m (e.g., -alm) to expand macros in a
 244   listing.
 245
 246 * Added -MD option to print dependencies.
 247
 248 Changes in 2.8:
 249
 250 * BeOS support added.
 251
 252 * MIPS16 support added.
 253
 254 * Motorola ColdFire 5200 support added (configure for m68k and use -m5200).
 255
 256 * Alpha/VMS support added.
 257
 258 * m68k options --base-size-default-16, --base-size-default-32,
 259   --disp-size-default-16, and --disp-size-default-32 added.
 260
 261 * The alignment directives now take an optional third argument, which is the
 262   maximum number of bytes to skip.  If doing the alignment would require
 263   skipping more than the given number of bytes, the alignment is not done at
 264   all.
 265
 266 * The ELF assembler has a new pseudo-op, .symver, used for symbol versioning.
 267
 268 * The -a option takes a new suboption, c (e.g., -alc), to skip false
 269   conditionals in listings.
 270
 271 * Added new pseudo-op, .equiv; it's like .equ, except that it is an error if
 272   the symbol is already defined.
 273
 274 Changes in 2.7:
 275
 276 * The PowerPC assembler now allows the use of symbolic register names (r0,
 277   etc.) if -mregnames is used.  Symbolic names preceded by a '%' (%r0, etc.)
 278   can be used any time.  PowerPC 860 move to/from SPR instructions have been
 279   added.
 280
 281 * Alpha Linux (ELF) support added.
 282
 283 * PowerPC ELF support added.
 284
 285 * m68k Linux (ELF) support added.
 286
 287 * i960 Hx/Jx support added.
 288
 289 * i386/PowerPC gnu-win32 support added.
 290
 291 * SCO ELF support added.  For OpenServer 5 targets (i386-unknown-sco3.2v5) the
 292   default is to build COFF-only support.  To get a set of tools that generate
 293   ELF (they'll understand both COFF and ELF), you must configure with
 294   target=i386-unknown-sco3.2v5elf.
 295
 296 * m88k-motorola-sysv3* support added.
 297
 298 Changes in 2.6:
 299
 300 * Gas now directly supports macros, without requiring GASP.
 301
 302 * Gas now has an MRI assembler compatibility mode.  Use -M or --mri to select
 303   MRI mode.  The pseudo-op ``.mri 1'' will switch into the MRI mode until the
 304   ``.mri 0'' is seen; this can be convenient for inline assembler code.
 305
 306 * Added --defsym SYM=VALUE option.
 307
 308 * Added -mips4 support to MIPS assembler.
 309
 310 * Added PIC support to Solaris and SPARC SunOS 4 assembler.
 311
 312 Changes in 2.4:
 313
 314 * Converted this directory to use an autoconf-generated configure script.
 315
 316 * ARM support, from Richard Earnshaw.
 317
 318 * Updated VMS support, from Pat Rankin, including considerably improved
 319   debugging support.
 320
 321 * Support for the control registers in the 68060.
 322
 323 * Handles (ignores) a new directive ".this_GCC_requires_the_GNU_assembler", to
 324   provide for possible future gcc changes, for targets where gas provides some
 325   features not available in the native assembler.  If the native assembler is
 326   used, it should become obvious pretty quickly what the problem is.
 327
 328 * Usage message is available with "--help".
 329
 330 * The GNU Assembler Preprocessor (gasp) is included.  (Actually, it was in 2.3
 331   also, but didn't get into the NEWS file.)
 332
 333 * Weak symbol support for a.out.
 334
 335 * A bug in the listing code which could cause an infinite loop has been fixed.
 336   Bugs in listings when generating a COFF object file have also been fixed.
 337
 338 * Initial i386-svr4 PIC implementation from Eric Youngdale, based on code by
 339   Paul Kranenburg.
 340
 341 * Improved Alpha support.  Immediate constants can have a much larger range
 342   now. Support for the 21164 has been contributed by Digital.
 343
 344 * Updated ns32k (pc532-mach, netbsd532) support from Ian Dall.
 345
 346 Changes in 2.3:
 347
 348 * Mach i386 support, by David Mackenzie and Ken Raeburn.
 349
 350 * RS/6000 and PowerPC support by Ian Taylor.
 351
 352 * VMS command scripts (make-gas.com, config-gas.com) have been worked on a bit,
 353   based on mail received from various people.  The `-h#' option should work
 354   again too.
 355
 356 * HP-PA work, by Jeff Law.  Note, for the PA, gas-2.3 has been designed to work
 357   with gdb-4.12 and gcc-2.6.  As gcc-2.6 has not been released yet, a special
 358   version of gcc-2.5.8 has been patched to work with gas-2.3.  You can retrieve
 359   this special version of gcc-2.5.8 via anonymous ftp from jaguar.cs.utah.edu
 360   in the "dist" directory.
 361
 362 * Vax support in gas fixed for BSD, so it builds and seems to run a couple
 363   simple tests okay.  I haven't put it through extensive testing.  (GNU make is
 364   currently required for BSD 4.3 builds.)
 365
 366 * Support for the DEC Alpha, running OSF/1 (ECOFF format).  The gas support is
 367   based on code donated by CMU, which used an a.out-based format.  I'm afraid
 368   the alpha-a.out support is pretty badly mangled, and much of it removed;
 369   making it work will require rewriting it as BFD support for the format anyways.
 370
 371 * Irix 5 support.
 372
 373 * The test suites have been fixed up a bit, so that they should work with a
 374   couple different versions of expect and dejagnu.
 375
 376 * Symbols' values are now handled internally as expressions, permitting more
 377   flexibility in evaluating them in some cases.  Some details of relocation
 378   handling have also changed, and simple constant pool management has been
 379   added, to make the Alpha port easier.
 380
 381 * New option "--statistics" for printing out program run times.  This is
 382   intended to be used with the gcc "-Q" option, which prints out times spent in
 383   various phases of compilation.  (You should be able to get all of them
 384   printed out with "gcc -Q -Wa,--statistics", I think.)
 385
 386 Changes in 2.2:
 387
 388 * RS/6000 AIX and MIPS SGI Irix 5 support has been added.
 389
 390 * Configurations that are still in development (and therefore are convenient to
 391   have listed in configure.in) still get rejected without a minor change to
 392   gas/Makefile.in, so people not doing development work shouldn't get the
 393   impression that support for such configurations is actually believed to be
 394   reliable.
 395
 396 * The program name (usually "as") is printed when a fatal error message is
 397   displayed.  This should prevent some confusion about the source of occasional
 398   messages about "internal errors".
 399
 400 * ELF support is falling into place.  Support for the 386 should be working.
 401   Support for SPARC Solaris is in.  HPPA support from Utah is being integrated.
 402
 403 * Symbol values are maintained as expressions instead of being immediately
 404   boiled down to add-symbol, sub-symbol, and constant.  This permits slightly
 405   more complex calculations involving symbols whose values are not alreadey
 406   known.
 407
 408 * DBX-style debugging info ("stabs") is now supported for COFF formats.
 409   If any stabs directives are seen in the source, GAS will create two new
 410   sections: a ".stab" and a ".stabstr" section.  The format of the .stab
 411   section is nearly identical to the a.out symbol format, and .stabstr is
 412   its string table.  For this to be useful, you must have configured GCC
 413   to generate stabs (by defining DBX_DEBUGGING_INFO), and must have a GDB
 414   that can use the stab sections (4.11 or later).
 415
 416 * LynxOS, on i386 and m68k platforms, is now supported.  SPARC LynxOS
 417   support is in progress.
 418
 419 Changes in 2.1:
 420
 421 * Several small fixes for i386-aix (PS/2) support from Minh Tran-Le have been
 422   incorporated, but not well tested yet.
 423
 424 * Altered the opcode table split for m68k; it should require less VM to compile
 425   with gcc now.
 426
 427 * Some minor adjustments to add (Convergent Technologies') Miniframe support,
 428   suggested by Ronald Cole.
 429
 430 * HPPA support (running OSF only, not HPUX) has been contributed by Utah.  This
 431   includes improved ELF support, which I've started adapting for SPARC Solaris
 432   2.x.  Integration isn't completely, so it probably won't work.
 433
 434 * HP9000/300 support, donated by HP, has been merged in.
 435
 436 * Ian Taylor has finished the MIPS ECOFF (Ultrix, Irix) support.
 437
 438 * Better error messages for unsupported configurations (e.g., hppa-hpux).
 439
 440 * Test suite framework is starting to become reasonable.
 441
 442 Changes in 2.0:
 443
 444 * Mostly bug fixes.
 445
 446 * Some more merging of BFD and ELF code, but ELF still doesn't work.
 447
 448 Changes in 1.94:
 449
 450 * BFD merge is partly done.  Adventurous souls may try giving configure the
 451   "--with-bfd-assembler" option.  Currently, ELF format requires it, a.out
 452   format accepts it; SPARC CPU accepts it.  It's the default only for OS "elf"
 453   or "solaris".  (ELF isn't really supported yet.  It needs work.  I've got
 454   some code from Utah for HP-PA ELF, and from DG for m88k ELF, but they're not
 455   fully merged yet.)
 456
 457 * The 68K opcode table has been split in half.  It should now compile under gcc
 458   without consuming ridiculous amounts of memory.
 459
 460 * A couple data structures have been reduced in size.  This should result in
 461   saving a little bit of space at runtime.
 462
 463 * Support for MIPS, from OSF and Ralph Campbell, has been merged in.  The OSF
 464   code provided ROSE format support, which I haven't merged in yet.  (I can
 465   make it available, if anyone wants to try it out.)  Ralph's code, for BSD
 466   4.4, supports a.out format.  We don't have ECOFF support in just yet; it's
 467   coming.
 468
 469 * Support for the Hitachi H8/500 has been added.
 470
 471 * VMS host and target support should be working now, thanks chiefly to Eric
 472   Youngdale.
 473
 474 Changes in 1.93.01:
 475
 476 * For m68k, support for more processors has been added: 68040, CPU32, 68851.
 477
 478 * For i386, .align is now power-of-two; was number-of-bytes.
 479
 480 * For m68k, "%" is now accepted before register names.  For COFF format, which
 481   doesn't use underscore prefixes for C labels, it is required, so variable "a0"
 482   can be distinguished from the register.
 483
 484 * Last public release was 1.38.  Lots of configuration changes since then, lots
 485   of new CPUs and formats, lots of bugs fixed.
 486
 487 \f
 488 Local variables:
 489 fill-column: 79
 490 End: