* NEWS: Mention addition of TILEPRO and TIKE-Gx support.
[deliverable/binutils-gdb.git] / gas / NEWS
1 -*- text -*-
2
3 * Add support for the Tilera TILEPRO and TILE-Gx architectures.
4
5 Changes in 2.21:
6
7 * Gas no longer requires doubling of ampersands in macros.
8
9 * Add support for the TMS320C6000 (TI C6X) processor family.
10
11 * GAS now understands an extended syntax in the .section directive flags
12 for COFF targets that allows the section's alignment to be specified. This
13 feature has also been backported to the 2.20 release series, starting with
14 2.20.1.
15
16 * Add support for the Renesas RX processor.
17
18 * New command line option, --compress-debug-sections, which requests
19 compression of DWARF debug information sections in the relocatable output
20 file. Compressed debug sections are supported by readelf, objdump, and
21 gold, but not currently by Gnu ld.
22
23 Changes in 2.20:
24
25 * Added support for v850e2 and v850e2v3.
26
27 * GNU/Linux targets now supports "gnu_unique_object" as a value in the .type
28 pseudo op. It marks the symbol as being globally unique in the entire
29 process.
30
31 * ARM assembler now supports .inst[.nw] pseudo-ops to insert opcodes specified
32 in binary rather than text.
33
34 * Add support for common symbol alignment to PE formats.
35
36 * Add support for the new discriminator column in the DWARF line table,
37 with a discriminator operand for the .loc directive.
38
39 * Add support for Sunplus score architecture.
40
41 * The .type pseudo-op now accepts a type of STT_GNU_IFUNC which can be used to
42 indicate that if the symbol is the target of a relocation, its value should
43 not be use. Instead the function should be invoked and its result used as
44 the value.
45
46 * Add support for Lattice Mico32 (lm32) architecture.
47
48 * Add support for Xilinx MicroBlaze architecture.
49
50 Changes in 2.19:
51
52 * New pseudo op .cfi_val_encoded_addr, to record constant addresses in unwind
53 tables without runtime relocation.
54
55 * New command line option, -h-tick-hex, for sh, m32c, and h8/300 targets, which
56 adds compatibility with H'00 style hex constants.
57
58 * New command line option, -msse-check=[none|error|warning], for x86
59 targets.
60
61 * New sub-option added to the assembler's -a command line switch to
62 generate a listing output. The 'g' sub-option will insert into the listing
63 various information about the assembly, such as assembler version, the
64 command line options used, and a time stamp.
65
66 * New command line option -msse2avx for x86 target to encode SSE
67 instructions with VEX prefix.
68
69 * Add Intel XSAVE, EPT, MOVBE, AES, PCLMUL, AVX/FMA support for x86 target.
70
71 * New command line options, -march=CPU[,+EXTENSION...], -mtune=CPU,
72 -mmnemonic=[att|intel], -msyntax=[att|intel], -mindex-reg,
73 -mnaked-reg and -mold-gcc, for x86 targets.
74
75 * Support for generating wide character strings has been added via the new
76 pseudo ops: .string16, .string32 and .string64.
77
78 * Support for SSE5 has been added to the i386 port.
79
80 Changes in 2.18:
81
82 * The GAS sources are now released under the GPLv3.
83
84 * Support for the National Semiconductor CR16 target has been added.
85
86 * Added gas .reloc pseudo. This is a low-level interface for creating
87 relocations.
88
89 * Add support for x86_64 PE+ target.
90
91 * Add support for Score target.
92
93 Changes in 2.17:
94
95 * Support for the Infineon XC16X has been added by KPIT Cummins Infosystems.
96
97 * Support for ms2 architecture has been added.
98
99 * Support for the Z80 processor family has been added.
100
101 * Add support for the "@<file>" syntax to the command line, so that extra
102 switches can be read from <file>.
103
104 * The SH target supports a new command line switch --enable-reg-prefix which,
105 if enabled, will allow register names to be optionally prefixed with a $
106 character. This allows register names to be distinguished from label names.
107
108 * Macros with a variable number of arguments are now supported. See the
109 documentation for how this works.
110
111 * Added --reduce-memory-overheads switch to reduce the size of the hash
112 tables used, at the expense of longer assembly times, and
113 --hash-size=<NUMBER> to set the size of the hash tables used by gas.
114
115 * Macro names and macro parameter names can now be any identifier that would
116 also be legal as a symbol elsewhere. For macro parameter names, this is
117 known to cause problems in certain sources when the respective target uses
118 characters inconsistently, and thus macro parameter references may no longer
119 be recognized as such (see the documentation for details).
120
121 * Support the .f_floating, .d_floating, .g_floating and .h_floating directives
122 for the VAX target in order to be more compatible with the VAX MACRO
123 assembler.
124
125 * New command line option -mtune=[itanium1|itanium2] for IA64 targets.
126
127 Changes in 2.16:
128
129 * Redefinition of macros now results in an error.
130
131 * New command line option -mhint.b=[ok|warning|error] for IA64 targets.
132
133 * New command line option -munwind-check=[warning|error] for IA64
134 targets.
135
136 * The IA64 port now uses automatic dependency violation removal as its default
137 mode.
138
139 * Port to MAXQ processor contributed by HCL Tech.
140
141 * Added support for generating unwind tables for ARM ELF targets.
142
143 * Add a -g command line option to generate debug information in the target's
144 preferred debug format.
145
146 * Support for the crx-elf target added.
147
148 * Support for the sh-symbianelf target added.
149
150 * Added a pseudo-op (.secrel32) to generate 32 bit section relative relocations
151 on pe[i]-i386; required for this target's DWARF 2 support.
152
153 * Support for Motorola MCF521x/5249/547x/548x added.
154
155 * Support for ColdFire EMAC instructions added and Motorola syntax for MAC/EMAC
156 instrucitons.
157
158 * New command line option -mno-shared for MIPS ELF targets.
159
160 * New command line option --alternate and pseudo-ops .altmacro and .noaltmacro
161 added to enter (and leave) alternate macro syntax mode.
162
163 Changes in 2.15:
164
165 * The MIPS -membedded-pic option (Embedded-PIC code generation) is
166 deprecated and will be removed in a future release.
167
168 * Added PIC m32r Linux (ELF) and support to M32R assembler.
169
170 * Added support for ARM V6.
171
172 * Added support for sh4a and variants.
173
174 * Support for Renesas M32R2 added.
175
176 * Limited support for Mapping Symbols as specified in the ARM ELF
177 specification has been added to the arm assembler.
178
179 * On ARM architectures, added a new gas directive ".unreq" that undoes
180 definitions created by ".req".
181
182 * Support for Motorola ColdFire MCF528x added.
183
184 * Added --gstabs+ switch to enable the generation of STABS debug format
185 information with GNU extensions.
186
187 * Added support for MIPS64 Release 2.
188
189 * Added support for v850e1.
190
191 * Added -n switch for x86 assembler. By default, x86 GAS replaces
192 multiple nop instructions used for alignment within code sections
193 with multi-byte nop instructions such as leal 0(%esi,1),%esi. This
194 switch disables the optimization.
195
196 * Removed -n option from MIPS assembler. It was not useful, and confused the
197 existing -non_shared option.
198
199 Changes in 2.14:
200
201 * Added support for MIPS32 Release 2.
202
203 * Added support for Xtensa architecture.
204
205 * Support for Intel's iWMMXt processor (an ARM variant) added.
206
207 * An assembler test generator has been contributed and an example file that
208 uses it (gas/testsuite/gas/all/test-gen.c and test-exmaple.c).
209
210 * Support for SH2E added.
211
212 * GASP has now been removed.
213
214 * Support for Texas Instruments TMS320C4x and TMS320C3x series of
215 DSP's contributed by Michael Hayes and Svein E. Seldal.
216
217 * Support for the Ubicom IP2xxx microcontroller added.
218
219 Changes in 2.13:
220
221 * Support for the Fujitsu FRV architecture added by Red Hat. Models for FR400
222 and FR500 included.
223
224 * Support for DLX processor added.
225
226 * GASP has now been deprecated and will be removed in a future release. Use
227 the macro facilities in GAS instead.
228
229 * GASP now correctly parses floating point numbers. Unless the base is
230 explicitly specified, they are interpreted as decimal numbers regardless of
231 the currently specified base.
232
233 Changes in 2.12:
234
235 * Support for Don Knuth's MMIX, by Hans-Peter Nilsson.
236
237 * Support for the OpenRISC 32-bit embedded processor by OpenCores.
238
239 * The ARM assembler now accepts -march=..., -mcpu=... and -mfpu=... for
240 specifying the target instruction set. The old method of specifying the
241 target processor has been deprecated, but is still accepted for
242 compatibility.
243
244 * Support for the VFP floating-point instruction set has been added to
245 the ARM assembler.
246
247 * New psuedo op: .incbin to include a set of binary data at a given point
248 in the assembly. Contributed by Anders Norlander.
249
250 * The MIPS assembler now accepts -march/-mtune. -mcpu has been deprecated
251 but still works for compatability.
252
253 * The MIPS assembler no longer issues a warning by default when it
254 generates a nop instruction from a macro. The new command line option
255 -n will turn on the warning.
256
257 Changes in 2.11:
258
259 * Support for PDP-11 and 2.11BSD a.out format, by Lars Brinkhoff.
260
261 * x86 gas now supports the full Pentium4 instruction set.
262
263 * Support for AMD x86-64 architecture, by Jan Hubicka, SuSE Labs.
264
265 * Support for Motorola 68HC11 and 68HC12.
266
267 * Support for Texas Instruments TMS320C54x (tic54x).
268
269 * Support for IA-64.
270
271 * Support for i860, by Jason Eckhardt.
272
273 * Support for CRIS (Axis Communications ETRAX series).
274
275 * x86 gas has a new .arch pseudo op to specify the target CPU architecture.
276
277 * x86 gas -q command line option quietens warnings about register size changes
278 due to suffix, indirect jmp/call without `*', stand-alone prefixes, and
279 translating various deprecated floating point instructions.
280
281 Changes in 2.10:
282
283 * Support for the ARM msr instruction was changed to only allow an immediate
284 operand when altering the flags field.
285
286 * Support for ATMEL AVR.
287
288 * Support for IBM 370 ELF. Somewhat experimental.
289
290 * Support for numbers with suffixes.
291
292 * Added support for breaking to the end of repeat loops.
293
294 * Added support for parallel instruction syntax (DOUBLEBAR_PARALLEL).
295
296 * New .elseif pseudo-op added.
297
298 * New --fatal-warnings option.
299
300 * picoJava architecture support added.
301
302 * Motorola MCore 210 processor support added.
303
304 * A new pseudo-op .intel_syntax has been implemented to allow gas to parse i386
305 assembly programs with intel syntax.
306
307 * New pseudo-ops .func,.endfunc to aid in debugging user-written assembler code.
308
309 * Added -gdwarf2 option to generate DWARF 2 debugging information.
310
311 * Full 16-bit mode support for i386.
312
313 * Greatly improved instruction operand checking for i386. This change will
314 produce errors or warnings on incorrect assembly code that previous versions
315 of gas accepted. If you get unexpected messages from code that worked with
316 older versions of gas, please double check the code before reporting a bug.
317
318 * Weak symbol support added for COFF targets.
319
320 * Mitsubishi D30V support added.
321
322 * Texas Instruments c80 (tms320c80) support added.
323
324 * i960 ELF support added.
325
326 * ARM ELF support added.
327
328 Changes in 2.9:
329
330 * Texas Instruments c30 (tms320c30) support added.
331
332 * The assembler now optimizes the exception frame information generated by egcs
333 and gcc 2.8. The new --traditional-format option disables this optimization.
334
335 * Added --gstabs option to generate stabs debugging information.
336
337 * The -a option takes a new suboption, m (e.g., -alm) to expand macros in a
338 listing.
339
340 * Added -MD option to print dependencies.
341
342 Changes in 2.8:
343
344 * BeOS support added.
345
346 * MIPS16 support added.
347
348 * Motorola ColdFire 5200 support added (configure for m68k and use -m5200).
349
350 * Alpha/VMS support added.
351
352 * m68k options --base-size-default-16, --base-size-default-32,
353 --disp-size-default-16, and --disp-size-default-32 added.
354
355 * The alignment directives now take an optional third argument, which is the
356 maximum number of bytes to skip. If doing the alignment would require
357 skipping more than the given number of bytes, the alignment is not done at
358 all.
359
360 * The ELF assembler has a new pseudo-op, .symver, used for symbol versioning.
361
362 * The -a option takes a new suboption, c (e.g., -alc), to skip false
363 conditionals in listings.
364
365 * Added new pseudo-op, .equiv; it's like .equ, except that it is an error if
366 the symbol is already defined.
367
368 Changes in 2.7:
369
370 * The PowerPC assembler now allows the use of symbolic register names (r0,
371 etc.) if -mregnames is used. Symbolic names preceded by a '%' (%r0, etc.)
372 can be used any time. PowerPC 860 move to/from SPR instructions have been
373 added.
374
375 * Alpha Linux (ELF) support added.
376
377 * PowerPC ELF support added.
378
379 * m68k Linux (ELF) support added.
380
381 * i960 Hx/Jx support added.
382
383 * i386/PowerPC gnu-win32 support added.
384
385 * SCO ELF support added. For OpenServer 5 targets (i386-unknown-sco3.2v5) the
386 default is to build COFF-only support. To get a set of tools that generate
387 ELF (they'll understand both COFF and ELF), you must configure with
388 target=i386-unknown-sco3.2v5elf.
389
390 * m88k-motorola-sysv3* support added.
391
392 Changes in 2.6:
393
394 * Gas now directly supports macros, without requiring GASP.
395
396 * Gas now has an MRI assembler compatibility mode. Use -M or --mri to select
397 MRI mode. The pseudo-op ``.mri 1'' will switch into the MRI mode until the
398 ``.mri 0'' is seen; this can be convenient for inline assembler code.
399
400 * Added --defsym SYM=VALUE option.
401
402 * Added -mips4 support to MIPS assembler.
403
404 * Added PIC support to Solaris and SPARC SunOS 4 assembler.
405
406 Changes in 2.4:
407
408 * Converted this directory to use an autoconf-generated configure script.
409
410 * ARM support, from Richard Earnshaw.
411
412 * Updated VMS support, from Pat Rankin, including considerably improved
413 debugging support.
414
415 * Support for the control registers in the 68060.
416
417 * Handles (ignores) a new directive ".this_GCC_requires_the_GNU_assembler", to
418 provide for possible future gcc changes, for targets where gas provides some
419 features not available in the native assembler. If the native assembler is
420 used, it should become obvious pretty quickly what the problem is.
421
422 * Usage message is available with "--help".
423
424 * The GNU Assembler Preprocessor (gasp) is included. (Actually, it was in 2.3
425 also, but didn't get into the NEWS file.)
426
427 * Weak symbol support for a.out.
428
429 * A bug in the listing code which could cause an infinite loop has been fixed.
430 Bugs in listings when generating a COFF object file have also been fixed.
431
432 * Initial i386-svr4 PIC implementation from Eric Youngdale, based on code by
433 Paul Kranenburg.
434
435 * Improved Alpha support. Immediate constants can have a much larger range
436 now. Support for the 21164 has been contributed by Digital.
437
438 * Updated ns32k (pc532-mach, netbsd532) support from Ian Dall.
439
440 Changes in 2.3:
441
442 * Mach i386 support, by David Mackenzie and Ken Raeburn.
443
444 * RS/6000 and PowerPC support by Ian Taylor.
445
446 * VMS command scripts (make-gas.com, config-gas.com) have been worked on a bit,
447 based on mail received from various people. The `-h#' option should work
448 again too.
449
450 * HP-PA work, by Jeff Law. Note, for the PA, gas-2.3 has been designed to work
451 with gdb-4.12 and gcc-2.6. As gcc-2.6 has not been released yet, a special
452 version of gcc-2.5.8 has been patched to work with gas-2.3. You can retrieve
453 this special version of gcc-2.5.8 via anonymous ftp from jaguar.cs.utah.edu
454 in the "dist" directory.
455
456 * Vax support in gas fixed for BSD, so it builds and seems to run a couple
457 simple tests okay. I haven't put it through extensive testing. (GNU make is
458 currently required for BSD 4.3 builds.)
459
460 * Support for the DEC Alpha, running OSF/1 (ECOFF format). The gas support is
461 based on code donated by CMU, which used an a.out-based format. I'm afraid
462 the alpha-a.out support is pretty badly mangled, and much of it removed;
463 making it work will require rewriting it as BFD support for the format anyways.
464
465 * Irix 5 support.
466
467 * The test suites have been fixed up a bit, so that they should work with a
468 couple different versions of expect and dejagnu.
469
470 * Symbols' values are now handled internally as expressions, permitting more
471 flexibility in evaluating them in some cases. Some details of relocation
472 handling have also changed, and simple constant pool management has been
473 added, to make the Alpha port easier.
474
475 * New option "--statistics" for printing out program run times. This is
476 intended to be used with the gcc "-Q" option, which prints out times spent in
477 various phases of compilation. (You should be able to get all of them
478 printed out with "gcc -Q -Wa,--statistics", I think.)
479
480 Changes in 2.2:
481
482 * RS/6000 AIX and MIPS SGI Irix 5 support has been added.
483
484 * Configurations that are still in development (and therefore are convenient to
485 have listed in configure.in) still get rejected without a minor change to
486 gas/Makefile.in, so people not doing development work shouldn't get the
487 impression that support for such configurations is actually believed to be
488 reliable.
489
490 * The program name (usually "as") is printed when a fatal error message is
491 displayed. This should prevent some confusion about the source of occasional
492 messages about "internal errors".
493
494 * ELF support is falling into place. Support for the 386 should be working.
495 Support for SPARC Solaris is in. HPPA support from Utah is being integrated.
496
497 * Symbol values are maintained as expressions instead of being immediately
498 boiled down to add-symbol, sub-symbol, and constant. This permits slightly
499 more complex calculations involving symbols whose values are not alreadey
500 known.
501
502 * DBX-style debugging info ("stabs") is now supported for COFF formats.
503 If any stabs directives are seen in the source, GAS will create two new
504 sections: a ".stab" and a ".stabstr" section. The format of the .stab
505 section is nearly identical to the a.out symbol format, and .stabstr is
506 its string table. For this to be useful, you must have configured GCC
507 to generate stabs (by defining DBX_DEBUGGING_INFO), and must have a GDB
508 that can use the stab sections (4.11 or later).
509
510 * LynxOS, on i386 and m68k platforms, is now supported. SPARC LynxOS
511 support is in progress.
512
513 Changes in 2.1:
514
515 * Several small fixes for i386-aix (PS/2) support from Minh Tran-Le have been
516 incorporated, but not well tested yet.
517
518 * Altered the opcode table split for m68k; it should require less VM to compile
519 with gcc now.
520
521 * Some minor adjustments to add (Convergent Technologies') Miniframe support,
522 suggested by Ronald Cole.
523
524 * HPPA support (running OSF only, not HPUX) has been contributed by Utah. This
525 includes improved ELF support, which I've started adapting for SPARC Solaris
526 2.x. Integration isn't completely, so it probably won't work.
527
528 * HP9000/300 support, donated by HP, has been merged in.
529
530 * Ian Taylor has finished the MIPS ECOFF (Ultrix, Irix) support.
531
532 * Better error messages for unsupported configurations (e.g., hppa-hpux).
533
534 * Test suite framework is starting to become reasonable.
535
536 Changes in 2.0:
537
538 * Mostly bug fixes.
539
540 * Some more merging of BFD and ELF code, but ELF still doesn't work.
541
542 Changes in 1.94:
543
544 * BFD merge is partly done. Adventurous souls may try giving configure the
545 "--with-bfd-assembler" option. Currently, ELF format requires it, a.out
546 format accepts it; SPARC CPU accepts it. It's the default only for OS "elf"
547 or "solaris". (ELF isn't really supported yet. It needs work. I've got
548 some code from Utah for HP-PA ELF, and from DG for m88k ELF, but they're not
549 fully merged yet.)
550
551 * The 68K opcode table has been split in half. It should now compile under gcc
552 without consuming ridiculous amounts of memory.
553
554 * A couple data structures have been reduced in size. This should result in
555 saving a little bit of space at runtime.
556
557 * Support for MIPS, from OSF and Ralph Campbell, has been merged in. The OSF
558 code provided ROSE format support, which I haven't merged in yet. (I can
559 make it available, if anyone wants to try it out.) Ralph's code, for BSD
560 4.4, supports a.out format. We don't have ECOFF support in just yet; it's
561 coming.
562
563 * Support for the Hitachi H8/500 has been added.
564
565 * VMS host and target support should be working now, thanks chiefly to Eric
566 Youngdale.
567
568 Changes in 1.93.01:
569
570 * For m68k, support for more processors has been added: 68040, CPU32, 68851.
571
572 * For i386, .align is now power-of-two; was number-of-bytes.
573
574 * For m68k, "%" is now accepted before register names. For COFF format, which
575 doesn't use underscore prefixes for C labels, it is required, so variable "a0"
576 can be distinguished from the register.
577
578 * Last public release was 1.38. Lots of configuration changes since then, lots
579 of new CPUs and formats, lots of bugs fixed.
580
581 \f
582 Local variables:
583 fill-column: 79
584 End:
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