gas/NEWS

   1 -*- text -*-
   2 GASP now correctly parses floating point numbers. Unless the base is explicitly
   3 specified, they are interpreted as decimal numbers regardless of the currently
   4 specified base.
   5
   6 Support for the OpenRISC 32-bit embedded processor by OpenCores.
   7
   8 The ARM assembler now accepts -march=..., -mcpu=... and -mfpu=... for
   9 specifying the target instruction set.  The old method of specifying the
  10 target processor has been deprecated, but is still accepted for
  11 compatibility.
  12
  13 Support for the VFP floating-point instruction set has been added to
  14 the ARM assembler.
  15
  16 New psuedo op: .incbin to include a set of binary data at a given point
  17 in the assembly.  Contributed by Anders Norlander.
  18
  19 The MIPS assembler now accepts -march/-mtune. -mcpu has been deprecated
  20 but still works for compatability.
  21
  22 The MIPS assembler no longer issues a warning by default when it
  23 generates a nop instruction from a macro. The new command line option
  24 -n will turn on the warning.
  25
  26 Changes in 2.11:
  27
  28 x86 gas now supports the full Pentium4 instruction set.
  29
  30 Support for AMD x86-64 architecture, by Jan Hubicka, SuSE Labs.
  31
  32 Support for Motorola 68HC11 and 68HC12.
  33
  34 Support for Texas Instruments TMS320C54x (tic54x).
  35
  36 Support for IA-64.
  37
  38 Support for i860, by Jason Eckhardt.
  39
  40 Support for CRIS (Axis Communications ETRAX series).
  41
  42 x86 gas has a new .arch pseudo op to specify the target CPU architecture.
  43
  44 x86 gas -q command line option quietens warnings about register size changes
  45 due to suffix, indirect jmp/call without `*', stand-alone prefixes, and
  46 translating various deprecated floating point instructions.
  47
  48 Changes in 2.10:
  49
  50 Support for the ARM msr instruction was changed to only allow an immediate
  51 operand when altering the flags field.
  52
  53 Support for ATMEL AVR.
  54
  55 Support for IBM 370 ELF.  Somewhat experimental.
  56
  57 Support for numbers with suffixes.
  58
  59 Added support for breaking to the end of repeat loops.
  60
  61 Added support for parallel instruction syntax (DOUBLEBAR_PARALLEL).
  62
  63 New .elseif pseudo-op added.
  64
  65 New --fatal-warnings option.
  66
  67 picoJava architecture support added.
  68
  69 Motorola MCore 210 processor support added.
  70
  71 A new pseudo-op .intel_syntax has been implemented to allow gas to parse i386
  72 assembly programs with intel syntax.
  73
  74 New pseudo-ops .func,.endfunc to aid in debugging user-written assembler code.
  75
  76 Added -gdwarf2 option to generate DWARF 2 debugging information.
  77
  78 Full 16-bit mode support for i386.
  79
  80 Greatly improved instruction operand checking for i386.  This change will
  81 produce errors or warnings on incorrect assembly code that previous versions of
  82 gas accepted.  If you get unexpected messages from code that worked with older
  83 versions of gas, please double check the code before reporting a bug.
  84
  85 Weak symbol support added for COFF targets.
  86
  87 Mitsubishi D30V support added.
  88
  89 Texas Instruments c80 (tms320c80) support added.
  90
  91 i960 ELF support added.
  92
  93 ARM ELF support added.
  94
  95 Changes in 2.9:
  96
  97 Texas Instruments c30 (tms320c30) support added.
  98
  99 The assembler now optimizes the exception frame information generated by egcs
 100 and gcc 2.8.  The new --traditional-format option disables this optimization.
 101
 102 Added --gstabs option to generate stabs debugging information.
 103
 104 The -a option takes a new suboption, m (e.g., -alm) to expand macros in a
 105 listing.
 106
 107 Added -MD option to print dependencies.
 108
 109 Changes in 2.8:
 110
 111 BeOS support added.
 112
 113 MIPS16 support added.
 114
 115 Motorola ColdFire 5200 support added (configure for m68k and use -m5200).
 116
 117 Alpha/VMS support added.
 118
 119 m68k options --base-size-default-16, --base-size-default-32,
 120 --disp-size-default-16, and --disp-size-default-32 added.
 121
 122 The alignment directives now take an optional third argument, which is the
 123 maximum number of bytes to skip.  If doing the alignment would require skipping
 124 more than the given number of bytes, the alignment is not done at all.
 125
 126 The ELF assembler has a new pseudo-op, .symver, used for symbol versioning.
 127
 128 The -a option takes a new suboption, c (e.g., -alc), to skip false conditionals
 129 in listings.
 130
 131 Added new pseudo-op, .equiv; it's like .equ, except that it is an error if the
 132 symbol is already defined.
 133
 134 Changes in 2.7:
 135
 136 The PowerPC assembler now allows the use of symbolic register names (r0, etc.)
 137 if -mregnames is used.  Symbolic names preceded by a '%' (%r0, etc.) can be
 138 used any time.  PowerPC 860 move to/from SPR instructions have been added.
 139
 140 Alpha Linux (ELF) support added.
 141
 142 PowerPC ELF support added.
 143
 144 m68k Linux (ELF) support added.
 145
 146 i960 Hx/Jx support added.
 147
 148 i386/PowerPC gnu-win32 support added.
 149
 150 SCO ELF support added.  For OpenServer 5 targets (i386-unknown-sco3.2v5) the
 151 default is to build COFF-only support.  To get a set of tools that generate ELF
 152 (they'll understand both COFF and ELF), you must configure with
 153 target=i386-unknown-sco3.2v5elf.
 154
 155 m88k-motorola-sysv3* support added.
 156
 157 Changes in 2.6:
 158
 159 Gas now directly supports macros, without requiring GASP.
 160
 161 Gas now has an MRI assembler compatibility mode.  Use -M or --mri to select MRI
 162 mode.  The pseudo-op ``.mri 1'' will switch into the MRI mode until the ``.mri
 163 0'' is seen; this can be convenient for inline assembler code.
 164
 165 Added --defsym SYM=VALUE option.
 166
 167 Added -mips4 support to MIPS assembler.
 168
 169 Added PIC support to Solaris and SPARC SunOS 4 assembler.
 170
 171 Changes in 2.4:
 172
 173 Converted this directory to use an autoconf-generated configure script.
 174
 175 ARM support, from Richard Earnshaw.
 176
 177 Updated VMS support, from Pat Rankin, including considerably improved debugging
 178 support.
 179
 180 Support for the control registers in the 68060.
 181
 182 Handles (ignores) a new directive ".this_GCC_requires_the_GNU_assembler", to
 183 provide for possible future gcc changes, for targets where gas provides some
 184 features not available in the native assembler.  If the native assembler is
 185 used, it should become obvious pretty quickly what the problem is.
 186
 187 Usage message is available with "--help".
 188
 189 The GNU Assembler Preprocessor (gasp) is included.  (Actually, it was in 2.3
 190 also, but didn't get into the NEWS file.)
 191
 192 Weak symbol support for a.out.
 193
 194 A bug in the listing code which could cause an infinite loop has been fixed.
 195 Bugs in listings when generating a COFF object file have also been fixed.
 196
 197 Initial i386-svr4 PIC implementation from Eric Youngdale, based on code by Paul
 198 Kranenburg.
 199
 200 Improved Alpha support.  Immediate constants can have a much larger range now.
 201 Support for the 21164 has been contributed by Digital.
 202
 203 Updated ns32k (pc532-mach, netbsd532) support from Ian Dall.
 204
 205 Changes in 2.3:
 206
 207 Mach i386 support, by David Mackenzie and Ken Raeburn.
 208
 209 RS/6000 and PowerPC support by Ian Taylor.
 210
 211 VMS command scripts (make-gas.com, config-gas.com) have been worked on a bit,
 212 based on mail received from various people.  The `-h#' option should work again
 213 too.
 214
 215 HP-PA work, by Jeff Law.  Note, for the PA, gas-2.3 has been designed to work
 216 with gdb-4.12 and gcc-2.6.  As gcc-2.6 has not been released yet, a special
 217 version of gcc-2.5.8 has been patched to work with gas-2.3.  You can retrieve
 218 this special version of gcc-2.5.8 via anonymous ftp from jaguar.cs.utah.edu
 219 in the "dist" directory.
 220
 221 Vax support in gas fixed for BSD, so it builds and seems to run a couple simple
 222 tests okay.  I haven't put it through extensive testing.  (GNU make is
 223 currently required for BSD 4.3 builds.)
 224
 225 Support for the DEC Alpha, running OSF/1 (ECOFF format).  The gas support is
 226 based on code donated by CMU, which used an a.out-based format.  I'm afraid the
 227 alpha-a.out support is pretty badly mangled, and much of it removed; making it
 228 work will require rewriting it as BFD support for the format anyways.
 229
 230 Irix 5 support.
 231
 232 The test suites have been fixed up a bit, so that they should work with a
 233 couple different versions of expect and dejagnu.
 234
 235 Symbols' values are now handled internally as expressions, permitting more
 236 flexibility in evaluating them in some cases.  Some details of relocation
 237 handling have also changed, and simple constant pool management has been added,
 238 to make the Alpha port easier.
 239
 240 New option "--statistics" for printing out program run times.  This is intended
 241 to be used with the gcc "-Q" option, which prints out times spent in various
 242 phases of compilation.  (You should be able to get all of them printed out with
 243 "gcc -Q -Wa,--statistics", I think.)
 244
 245 ----------------------------------------------------------------
 246
 247 Changes in 2.2:
 248
 249 RS/6000 AIX and MIPS SGI Irix 5 support has been added.
 250
 251 Configurations that are still in development (and therefore are convenient to
 252 have listed in configure.in) still get rejected without a minor change to
 253 gas/Makefile.in, so people not doing development work shouldn't get the
 254 impression that support for such configurations is actually believed to be
 255 reliable.
 256
 257 The program name (usually "as") is printed when a fatal error message is
 258 displayed.  This should prevent some confusion about the source of occasional
 259 messages about "internal errors".
 260
 261 ELF support is falling into place.  Support for the 386 should be working.
 262 Support for SPARC Solaris is in.  HPPA support from Utah is being integrated.
 263
 264 Symbol values are maintained as expressions instead of being immediately boiled
 265 down to add-symbol, sub-symbol, and constant.  This permits slightly more
 266 complex calculations involving symbols whose values are not alreadey known.
 267
 268 DBX-style debugging info ("stabs") is now supported for COFF formats.
 269 If any stabs directives are seen in the source, GAS will create two new
 270 sections: a ".stab" and a ".stabstr" section.  The format of the .stab
 271 section is nearly identical to the a.out symbol format, and .stabstr is
 272 its string table.  For this to be useful, you must have configured GCC
 273 to generate stabs (by defining DBX_DEBUGGING_INFO), and must have a GDB
 274 that can use the stab sections (4.11 or later).
 275
 276 LynxOS, on i386 and m68k platforms, is now supported.  SPARC LynxOS
 277 support is in progress.
 278
 279 ----------------------------------------------------------------
 280
 281 Changes in 2.1:
 282
 283 Several small fixes for i386-aix (PS/2) support from Minh Tran-Le have been
 284 incorporated, but not well tested yet.
 285
 286 Altered the opcode table split for m68k; it should require less VM to compile
 287 with gcc now.
 288
 289 Some minor adjustments to add (Convergent Technologies') Miniframe support,
 290 suggested by Ronald Cole.
 291
 292 HPPA support (running OSF only, not HPUX) has been contributed by Utah.  This
 293 includes improved ELF support, which I've started adapting for SPARC Solaris
 294 2.x.  Integration isn't completely, so it probably won't work.
 295
 296 HP9000/300 support, donated by HP, has been merged in.
 297
 298 Ian Taylor has finished the MIPS ECOFF (Ultrix, Irix) support.
 299
 300 Better error messages for unsupported configurations (e.g., hppa-hpux).
 301
 302 Test suite framework is starting to become reasonable.
 303
 304 ----------------------------------------------------------------
 305
 306 Changes in 2.0:
 307
 308 Mostly bug fixes.
 309
 310 Some more merging of BFD and ELF code, but ELF still doesn't work.
 311
 312 ----------------------------------------------------------------
 313
 314 Changes in 1.94:
 315
 316 BFD merge is partly done.  Adventurous souls may try giving configure the
 317 "--with-bfd-assembler" option.  Currently, ELF format requires it, a.out format
 318 accepts it; SPARC CPU accepts it.  It's the default only for OS "elf" or
 319 "solaris".  (ELF isn't really supported yet.  It needs work.  I've got some
 320 code from Utah for HP-PA ELF, and from DG for m88k ELF, but they're not fully
 321 merged yet.)
 322
 323 The 68K opcode table has been split in half.  It should now compile under gcc
 324 without consuming ridiculous amounts of memory.
 325
 326 A couple data structures have been reduced in size.  This should result in
 327 saving a little bit of space at runtime.
 328
 329 Support for MIPS, from OSF and Ralph Campbell, has been merged in.  The OSF
 330 code provided ROSE format support, which I haven't merged in yet.  (I can make
 331 it available, if anyone wants to try it out.)  Ralph's code, for BSD 4.4,
 332 supports a.out format.  We don't have ECOFF support in just yet; it's coming.
 333
 334 Support for the Hitachi H8/500 has been added.
 335
 336 VMS host and target support should be working now, thanks chiefly to Eric
 337 Youngdale.
 338
 339 ----------------------------------------------------------------
 340
 341 Changes in 1.93.01:
 342
 343 For m68k, support for more processors has been added: 68040, CPU32, 68851.
 344
 345 For i386, .align is now power-of-two; was number-of-bytes.
 346
 347 For m68k, "%" is now accepted before register names.  For COFF format, which
 348 doesn't use underscore prefixes for C labels, it is required, so variable "a0"
 349 can be distinguished from the register.
 350
 351 Last public release was 1.38.  Lots of configuration changes since then, lots
 352 of new CPUs and formats, lots of bugs fixed.
 353
 354 \f
 355 Local variables:
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 357 End: