Re: Delay the branch for E500 native support

[Daniel Jacobowitz <drow at false dot org>]

On Fri, Jul 02, 2004 at 05:26:35PM -0500, Jim Blandy wrote:
> 
> Would it be possible to delay the GDB 6.2 branch for another week,
> until Fri, July 9th?
> 
> It would be really nice for 6.2 to contain full, unqualified native
> PowerPC E500 Linux support.  We're really close.  The bulk of it is
> committed and working.  The two missing pieces are that you can't
> access the E500's vector registers in multi-threaded programs, and you
> can't refer to variables located in vector registers, because of GCC's
> use of DW_OP_piece.  I've posted patches to address the first problem,
> which are being discussed for revision, and I'm working on patches for
> the second issue, revised as discussed in the thread at:
> 
>     http://sources.redhat.com/ml/gdb-patches/2003-05/msg00425.html

DW_OP_piece will presumably be a substantial change.  While I'd love to
see it in GDB 6.2:
  (A) A week before the branch is not a good time for huge new
features.
  (B) it can be merged after the branch is cut, once it is known to
work on HEAD and has been tested - in fact this is probably preferable
to committing before the branch.

The vector register stuff I have no comments about, since it's not
going to affect other targets in the same way.  That's an even better
candidate for committing to the branch after branching.

> I'm happy to put in time over the U.S. holiday weekend, and do what it
> takes next week to get it all posted for further review by midweek.
> If maintainers can give me detailed instructions on how they want the
> patches revised, I'll be happy to comply.
> 
> I'd just really like to be able to say, in the GDB 6.2 NEWS: "Added
> support for native PowerPC E500 Linux", without qualifications.

I would really have liked for GDB 6.1 to contain inter-compilation-unit
reference support too.  If the timing doesn't work out, it doesn't work
out - if the schedule holds there may even be another release this
year.

-- 
Daniel Jacobowitz