gas/NEWS

   1 -*- text -*-
   2
   3 Changes since 2.3:
   4
   5 Converted this directory to use an autoconf-generated configure script.
   6
   7 ARM support, from Richard Earnshaw.
   8
   9 Updated VMS support, from Pat Rankin, including considerably improved debugging
  10 support.
  11
  12 Support for the control registers in the 68060.
  13
  14 Handles (ignores) a new directive ".this_GCC_requires_the_GNU_assembler", to
  15 provide for possible future gcc changes, for targets where gas provides some
  16 features not available in the native assembler.  If the native assembler is
  17 used, it should become obvious pretty quickly what the problem is.
  18
  19 Usage message is available with "--help".
  20
  21 Weak symbol support for a.out.
  22
  23 A bug in the listing code which could cause an infinite loop has been fixed.
  24 Bugs in listings when generating a COFF object file have also been fixed.
  25
  26 Initial i386-svr4 PIC implementation from Eric Youngdale, based on code by Paul
  27 Kranenburg.  This code was oriented towards gas version 1.xx; in updating some
  28 aspects of it for version 2, I broke it.
  29
  30 Improved Alpha support.  Immediate constants can have a much larger range now.
  31 Support for the 21164 has been added.
  32
  33 Updated ns32k (pc532-mach, netbsd532) support from Ian Dall.
  34
  35 Changes since 2.2:
  36
  37 Mach i386 support, by David Mackenzie and Ken Raeburn.
  38
  39 RS/6000 and PowerPC support by Ian Taylor.
  40
  41 VMS command scripts (make-gas.com, config-gas.com) have been worked on a bit,
  42 based on mail received from various people.  The `-h#' option should work again
  43 too.
  44
  45 HP-PA work, by Jeff Law.  Note, for the PA, gas-2.3 has been designed to work
  46 with gdb-4.12 and gcc-2.6.  As gcc-2.6 has not been released yet, a special
  47 version of gcc-2.5.8 has been patched to work with gas-2.3.  You can retrieve
  48 this special version of gcc-2.5.8 via anonymous ftp from jaguar.cs.utah.edu
  49 in the "dist" directory.
  50
  51 Vax support in gas fixed for BSD, so it builds and seems to run a couple simple
  52 tests okay.  I haven't put it through extensive testing.  (GNU make is
  53 currently required for BSD 4.3 builds.)
  54
  55 Support for the DEC Alpha, running OSF/1 (ECOFF format).  The gas support is
  56 based on code donated by CMU, which used an a.out-based format.  I'm afraid the
  57 alpha-a.out support is pretty badly mangled, and much of it removed; making it
  58 work will require rewriting it as BFD support for the format anyways.
  59
  60 Irix 5 support.
  61
  62 The test suites have been fixed up a bit, so that they should work with a
  63 couple different versions of expect and dejagnu.
  64
  65 Symbols' values are now handled internally as expressions, permitting more
  66 flexibility in evaluating them in some cases.  Some details of relocation
  67 handling have also changed, and simple constant pool management has been added,
  68 to make the Alpha port easier.
  69
  70 New option "--statistics" for printing out program run times.  This is intended
  71 to be used with the gcc "-Q" option, which prints out times spent in various
  72 phases of compilation.  (You should be able to get all of them printed out with
  73 "gcc -Q -Wa,--statistics", I think.)
  74
  75 ----------------------------------------------------------------
  76
  77 Changes since 2.1:
  78
  79 RS/6000 AIX and MIPS SGI Irix 5 support has been added.
  80
  81 Configurations that are still in development (and therefore are convenient to
  82 have listed in configure.in) still get rejected without a minor change to
  83 gas/Makefile.in, so people not doing development work shouldn't get the
  84 impression that support for such configurations is actually believed to be
  85 reliable.
  86
  87 The program name (usually "as") is printed when a fatal error message is
  88 displayed.  This should prevent some confusion about the source of occasional
  89 messages about "internal errors".
  90
  91 ELF support is falling into place.  Support for the 386 should be working.
  92 Support for SPARC Solaris is in.  HPPA support from Utah is being integrated.
  93
  94 Symbol values are maintained as expressions instead of being immediately boiled
  95 down to add-symbol, sub-symbol, and constant.  This permits slightly more
  96 complex calculations involving symbols whose values are not alreadey known.
  97
  98 DBX-style debugging info ("stabs") is now supported for COFF formats.
  99 If any stabs directives are seen in the source, GAS will create two new
 100 sections: a ".stab" and a ".stabstr" section.  The format of the .stab
 101 section is nearly identical to the a.out symbol format, and .stabstr is
 102 its string table.  For this to be useful, you must have configured GCC
 103 to generate stabs (by defining DBX_DEBUGGING_INFO), and must have a GDB
 104 that can use the stab sections (4.11 or later).
 105
 106 LynxOS, on i386 and m68k platforms, is now supported.  SPARC LynxOS
 107 support is in progress.
 108
 109 ----------------------------------------------------------------
 110
 111 Changes for 2.1:
 112
 113 Several small fixes for i386-aix (PS/2) support from Minh Tran-Le have been
 114 incorporated, but not well tested yet.
 115
 116 Altered the opcode table split for m68k; it should require less VM to compile
 117 with gcc now.
 118
 119 Some minor adjustments to add (Convergent Technologies') Miniframe support,
 120 suggested by Ronald Cole.
 121
 122 HPPA support (running OSF only, not HPUX) has been contributed by Utah.  This
 123 includes improved ELF support, which I've started adapting for SPARC Solaris
 124 2.x.  Integration isn't completely, so it probably won't work.
 125
 126 HP9000/300 support, donated by HP, has been merged in.
 127
 128 Ian Taylor has finished the MIPS ECOFF (Ultrix, Irix) support.
 129
 130 Better error messages for unsupported configurations (e.g., hppa-hpux).
 131
 132 Test suite framework is starting to become reasonable.
 133
 134 ----------------------------------------------------------------
 135
 136 Changes for 2.0:
 137
 138 Mostly bug fixes.
 139
 140 Some more merging of BFD and ELF code, but ELF still doesn't work.
 141
 142 ----------------------------------------------------------------
 143
 144 Changes for 1.94:
 145
 146 BFD merge is partly done.  Adventurous souls may try giving configure the
 147 "--with-bfd-assembler" option.  Currently, ELF format requires it, a.out format
 148 accepts it; SPARC CPU accepts it.  It's the default only for OS "elf" or
 149 "solaris".  (ELF isn't really supported yet.  It needs work.  I've got some
 150 code from Utah for HP-PA ELF, and from DG for m88k ELF, but they're not fully
 151 merged yet.)
 152
 153 The 68K opcode table has been split in half.  It should now compile under gcc
 154 without consuming ridiculous amounts of memory.
 155
 156 A couple data structures have been reduced in size.  This should result in
 157 saving a little bit of space at runtime.
 158
 159 Support for MIPS, from OSF and Ralph Campbell, has been merged in.  The OSF
 160 code provided ROSE format support, which I haven't merged in yet.  (I can make
 161 it available, if anyone wants to try it out.)  Ralph's code, for BSD 4.4,
 162 supports a.out format.  We don't have ECOFF support in just yet; it's coming.
 163
 164 Support for the Hitachi H8/500 has been added.
 165
 166 VMS host and target support should be working now, thanks chiefly to Eric
 167 Youngdale.
 168
 169 ----------------------------------------------------------------
 170
 171 Changes for 1.93.01:
 172
 173 For m68k, support for more processors has been added: 68040, CPU32, 68851.
 174
 175 For i386, .align is now power-of-two; was number-of-bytes.
 176
 177 For m68k, "%" is now accepted before register names.  For COFF format, which
 178 doesn't use underscore prefixes for C labels, it is required, so variable "a0"
 179 can be distinguished from the register.
 180
 181 Last public release was 1.38.  Lots of configuration changes since then, lots
 182 of new CPUs and formats, lots of bugs fixed.
 183
 184 \f
 185 Local variables:
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 187 End: