Re: Target-specific FDE pointer sizes (2/3)

[Richard Sandiford <rsandifo at redhat dot com>]

Nick Clifton <nickc@redhat.com> writes:
> Hi Richard,
>> As with the bfd patch, we need to distinguish between the official
>> LP64 ABI and the not-so-official ILP32 variant.  In the case of bfd,
>> it was important that we get the size right, and we had to punt if
>> we weren't sure.  In the case of readelf, I think we just want a
>> "best guess", since we have to output _something_.
>
> I think that if readelf has to guess it should inform the user that it
> is doing so.  That way the user has a chance to realise that readelf
> might have guessed incorrectly and that is why its output does not match
> their expectations.

Any chance of persuading you otherwise? ;)  Three reasons:

  - It doesn't seem very useful to print a warning if the user has no
    way of overriding the guess.  If we do warn about this, I suppose
    we'd also have to add a MIPS-EABI64-specific command-line option
    to readelf, and like I said in my original posting, I'd really
    rather not do that.  There's certainly no precedent with the
    existing options.

  - I don't want to warn about unmarked LP64 objects since there's
    nothing suspect about them.  They do exactly what the official
    ABI said they should do.

  - People only ended up with unmarked ILP32 objects through using an
    undocumented combination of gcc command-line options.  I think 
    it's reasonable for tools like readelf (and gdb, etc.) to treat
    EABI objects as being ABI-conforming without any evidence to
    the contrary.

Richard