Re: The initial results (Re: stable binutils, gcc, glibc ...

[Ralf Baechle <ralf@oss.sgi.com>]

On Tue, Oct 17, 2000 at 09:04:54PM -0700, Jun Sun wrote:

> (Ralf, you cannot find egcs-1.0.3a.tar.gz release on the net anymore. 
> You probably want to save this file on the same site with the diff
> file.)

1.0.3a is part of the srpm packages on oss.

> c) glibc 2.0.6 + mips patch
> 
> ftp://oss.sgi.com/pub/linux/mips/glibc/srpms/glibc-2.0.6-5lm.src.rpm

I have a glibc-2.0.6-7lm almost ready, still needs some more testing.

> I also had success with latest binutils CVS tree.  I gave a try to the
> latest gcc, but did not look into it further.

Same here with a tree that is a few days old.  I haven't yet tried to 
build a kernel but for userland I have no relevant problem compared
to 2.8.1 but tons of fixed ones.

One ancient bug which is about to become a serious one still exist in
gas.  Gas doesn't properly handle branch that exceed the +/- 128kb
range that can be encoded in the 16-bit branch offset.  It should
(SGI's as does) expand the branch as a macro instruction like this:

loop:
	[...]
	beq	r1, r2, loop

should be turned into:

loop:
	[...]
	bnez	r1, r2, 1f
	j	loop
1:

but of course only if the branch destination is outside the 16-bit range.
Thanks to the ever increasing code size there are now several realworld
examples which run into this problem.  Volunteers?

  Ralf