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Re: really confused by mips target formats


On Tue, Feb 28, 2006 at 11:03:33AM +0800, Eric Fisher wrote:
[snip]
> Let's just talk about elf flavour. What are the traditional mips,
> non-traditional mips and newabi? Why do both traditional mips and
> non-traditional mips contain newabi?

Traditional mips is the flavour used before SGI went ahead and screwed
it up. :-)

> Why does the object file assembled by mips-linux-as have elf32-tradbigmips
> format? While one by mips-elf-as has elf32-bigmips?

At one point, the SGI-ish flavour was used for both. For a linux
userland with its dynamic libraries the traditional format seemed to
be more sensible (and more in line with other ELF implementations).
For mips-elf embedded systems, the backward compatibility argument
had more weight, they continued to use SGI-ish objects.


Thiemo


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