Re: [Fwd: Current state of MIPS16 support?]

[Daniel Jacobowitz <dan@debian.org>]

On Wed, Jun 05, 2002 at 04:39:45PM +0100, Dominic Sweetman wrote:
> > I'm not certain what you are actually fixing here as I've not seen any
> > descriptions of problems here...
> 
> Hmm.  Linux/MIPS suffers from widespread and diffuse toolchain
> problems: I thought that much was pretty clear to all involved.  I
> agree it seems a pity that the scheme of work laid out above should be
> necessary...

...

> > Almost 90% of the bug reports I see are against IRIX.
> 
> That does suggest you're missing some pretty large chunks of the
> community!

No, that's not what it suggests at all.  It suggests to me that the
dubious state of Linux/MIPS toolchains is due to one of two things:
  - A pre-existing acceptance of this rather than any real problems
  - A reluctance to file bug reports

We've been using GCC for MIPS for several years now and seen relatively
few significant problems, so I suspect the former.  There's definitely
some of the latter as well, since we've hit more roadblocks on MIPS
than on, say, x86 or PowerPC; it's not our worst problem architecture,
though.  And we've been able to fix them all relatively easily.

I'm sure GCC would benefit from access to your regression tests, though :)

-- 
Daniel Jacobowitz                           Carnegie Mellon University
MontaVista Software                         Debian GNU/Linux Developer