GDB 5 for mips-linux/Shared library loading with new binutils/glibc

[Justin Carlson <carlson@sibyte.com>]

Working with some pretty bleeding edge GNU tools, here, and there doesn't seem
to be any support for mips-linux in GDB 5.  Has anyone else run across this,
and, if so, are there patches available somewhere?

Also, I've run into a problem with ld.so from glibc-2.2 on mips32-linux.  After
some hunting, I found that the templates in elf32bsmip.sh for gnu ld have
recently changed to support SHLIB_TEXT_START_ADDR as a (non-zero) base address
for shared library loading.  SHLIB_TEXT_START_ADDR defaults to 0x5ffe0000 in
the current sources.

I'm curious if anyone knows the rationale for these changes.  Best conjecture
I've heard is that it allows ld.so to not have to relocate itself, as it will
load by default to the high address.  

However, ld.so seems to know nothing about relocating shared library with a
non-zero shared library base address, which causes dynamically linked stuff to
crash spectacularly.  

I think fixing ld.so won't be too difficult, but I'm really wanting to find out
why these changes were made.  And whether I'm reinventing some wheels by fixing
ld.so to cope with the new binutils stuff.

Anyone tread the ground before?

binutils we're using is from CVS as of about Dec 17th.  Glibc is also a
snapshot from about the same time.

-Justin