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Re: RFA: Recording MIPS ABI selection in binaries
- To: Nick Clifton <nickc at redhat dot com>
- Subject: Re: RFA: Recording MIPS ABI selection in binaries
- From: Jeffrey A Law <law at cygnus dot com>
- Date: Wed, 09 Aug 2000 07:52:02 -0600
- cc: cgd at sibyte dot com, gcc-patches at gcc dot gnu dot org, gdb-patches at sources dot redhat dot com
- Reply-To: law at cygnus dot com
In message <200008090030.RAA19784@elmo.cygnus.com>you write:
> Hi Chris,
>
> : as far as i'm concerned, there could have been better use of the
> : existing bits for ABIs (by enumeration, rather than flags)
>
> Indeed, but as you say we are stuck with legacy code which we need to
> carry on supporting, so I doubt if these flags will change any time
> soon.
Correct. For a number of platforms (such as many embedded MIPS chips) the
GNU tools defined the de-facto ABI.
> : Personally I'd like to see the existing flags rationalized to the
> : extent that they can be, and improved from there, rather than
> : perpetuate the existing morass and even make it worse by introducing a
> : mechanism that's not particularly scalable,
>
> The scheme is scalable. In fact it is more scalable than the existing
> scheme of using bits in the file header. The sections can have
> arbitrary names which can be used to encode pretty much anything.
Yup. Or we can put arbitrary contents into a non-loadable section to
record information we care about.
jeff