Re: mips gas is horribly broken

["H . J . Lu" <hjl at lucon dot org>]

On Wed, Jun 06, 2001 at 11:21:23PM -0700, Ian Lance Taylor wrote:
> 
> bfd_install_relocation has all the information that it needs.  The
> problem is that it does the wrong thing.
> 
> If you want to incrementally improve it, I recommend that you consider
> the section ``BFD relocation future'' which I wrote in
> bfd/doc/bfdint.texi.
> 
> This is not a place for quick hacks.  Quick hacks got us where we are
> today.  This is place for a designed approach.  Write the design, put
> it out for comments, then implement it.

I am afraid I don't have the time to do what you suggested all by
myself. What I am looking for are

1. Fix ELF/mips.
2. No changes to other targets.
3. Minimum changes to ELF/mips.

I checked in a gas testcase for the problem I have. I noticed that
bfd_elf_generic_reloc called from bfd_install_relocation does the wrong
thing on ELF/mips. Basically, it should return bfd_reloc_continue. But
since reloc_entry->addend is 0 for that special case, bfd_reloc_ok is
returned instead. If somehow the assembler can pass that information
to a special bfd_elf_generic_reloc for mips, ELF/mips should be ok. I
am thinking to add a new field, adden_info, to reloc_cache_entry. The
ELF/mips assembler can set it if necessary. Then the mips special
bfd_elf_generic_reloc can check it in addition to reloc_entry->addend
when dicide what to return. The impact should be limited and I can
do it myself.


H.J.