gas/NEWS

   1 -*- text -*-
   2
   3 Changes in 2.11:
   4
   5 Support for Motorola 68HC11 and 68HC12.
   6
   7 Support for Texas Instruments TMS320C54x (tic54x).
   8
   9 Support for IA-64.
  10
  11 Support for i860, by Jason Eckhardt.
  12
  13 Support for CRIS (Axis Communications ETRAX series).
  14
  15 x86 gas has a new .arch pseudo op to specify the target CPU architecture.
  16
  17 x86 gas -q command line option quietens warnings about register size changes
  18 due to suffix, indirect jmp/call without `*', stand-alone prefixes, and
  19 translating various deprecated floating point instructions.
  20
  21 Changes in 2.10:
  22
  23 Support for ATMEL AVR.
  24
  25 Support for IBM 370 ELF.  Somewhat experimental.
  26
  27 Support for numbers with suffixes.
  28
  29 Added support for breaking to the end of repeat loops.
  30
  31 Added support for parallel instruction syntax (DOUBLEBAR_PARALLEL).
  32
  33 New .elseif pseudo-op added.
  34
  35 New --fatal-warnings option.
  36
  37 picoJava architecture support added.
  38
  39 Motorola MCore 210 processor support added.
  40
  41 A new pseudo-op .intel_syntax has been implemented to allow gas to parse i386
  42 assembly programs with intel syntax.
  43
  44 New pseudo-ops .func,.endfunc to aid in debugging user-written assembler code.
  45
  46 Added -gdwarf2 option to generate DWARF 2 debugging information.
  47
  48 Full 16-bit mode support for i386.
  49
  50 Greatly improved instruction operand checking for i386.  This change will
  51 produce errors or warnings on incorrect assembly code that previous versions of
  52 gas accepted.  If you get unexpected messages from code that worked with older
  53 versions of gas, please double check the code before reporting a bug.
  54
  55 Weak symbol support added for COFF targets.
  56
  57 Mitsubishi D30V support added.
  58
  59 Texas Instruments c80 (tms320c80) support added.
  60
  61 i960 ELF support added.
  62
  63 ARM ELF support added.
  64
  65 Changes in 2.9:
  66
  67 Texas Instruments c30 (tms320c30) support added.
  68
  69 The assembler now optimizes the exception frame information generated by egcs
  70 and gcc 2.8.  The new --traditional-format option disables this optimization.
  71
  72 Added --gstabs option to generate stabs debugging information.
  73
  74 The -a option takes a new suboption, m (e.g., -alm) to expand macros in a
  75 listing.
  76
  77 Added -MD option to print dependencies.
  78
  79 Changes in 2.8:
  80
  81 BeOS support added.
  82
  83 MIPS16 support added.
  84
  85 Motorola ColdFire 5200 support added (configure for m68k and use -m5200).
  86
  87 Alpha/VMS support added.
  88
  89 m68k options --base-size-default-16, --base-size-default-32,
  90 --disp-size-default-16, and --disp-size-default-32 added.
  91
  92 The alignment directives now take an optional third argument, which is the
  93 maximum number of bytes to skip.  If doing the alignment would require skipping
  94 more than the given number of bytes, the alignment is not done at all.
  95
  96 The ELF assembler has a new pseudo-op, .symver, used for symbol versioning.
  97
  98 The -a option takes a new suboption, c (e.g., -alc), to skip false conditionals
  99 in listings.
 100
 101 Added new pseudo-op, .equiv; it's like .equ, except that it is an error if the
 102 symbol is already defined.
 103
 104 Changes in 2.7:
 105
 106 The PowerPC assembler now allows the use of symbolic register names (r0, etc.)
 107 if -mregnames is used.  Symbolic names preceded by a '%' (%r0, etc.) can be
 108 used any time.  PowerPC 860 move to/from SPR instructions have been added.
 109
 110 Alpha Linux (ELF) support added.
 111
 112 PowerPC ELF support added.
 113
 114 m68k Linux (ELF) support added.
 115
 116 i960 Hx/Jx support added.
 117
 118 i386/PowerPC gnu-win32 support added.
 119
 120 SCO ELF support added.  For OpenServer 5 targets (i386-unknown-sco3.2v5) the
 121 default is to build COFF-only support.  To get a set of tools that generate ELF
 122 (they'll understand both COFF and ELF), you must configure with
 123 target=i386-unknown-sco3.2v5elf.
 124
 125 m88k-motorola-sysv3* support added.
 126
 127 Changes in 2.6:
 128
 129 Gas now directly supports macros, without requiring GASP.
 130
 131 Gas now has an MRI assembler compatibility mode.  Use -M or --mri to select MRI
 132 mode.  The pseudo-op ``.mri 1'' will switch into the MRI mode until the ``.mri
 133 0'' is seen; this can be convenient for inline assembler code.
 134
 135 Added --defsym SYM=VALUE option.
 136
 137 Added -mips4 support to MIPS assembler.
 138
 139 Added PIC support to Solaris and SPARC SunOS 4 assembler.
 140
 141 Changes in 2.4:
 142
 143 Converted this directory to use an autoconf-generated configure script.
 144
 145 ARM support, from Richard Earnshaw.
 146
 147 Updated VMS support, from Pat Rankin, including considerably improved debugging
 148 support.
 149
 150 Support for the control registers in the 68060.
 151
 152 Handles (ignores) a new directive ".this_GCC_requires_the_GNU_assembler", to
 153 provide for possible future gcc changes, for targets where gas provides some
 154 features not available in the native assembler.  If the native assembler is
 155 used, it should become obvious pretty quickly what the problem is.
 156
 157 Usage message is available with "--help".
 158
 159 The GNU Assembler Preprocessor (gasp) is included.  (Actually, it was in 2.3
 160 also, but didn't get into the NEWS file.)
 161
 162 Weak symbol support for a.out.
 163
 164 A bug in the listing code which could cause an infinite loop has been fixed.
 165 Bugs in listings when generating a COFF object file have also been fixed.
 166
 167 Initial i386-svr4 PIC implementation from Eric Youngdale, based on code by Paul
 168 Kranenburg.
 169
 170 Improved Alpha support.  Immediate constants can have a much larger range now.
 171 Support for the 21164 has been contributed by Digital.
 172
 173 Updated ns32k (pc532-mach, netbsd532) support from Ian Dall.
 174
 175 Changes in 2.3:
 176
 177 Mach i386 support, by David Mackenzie and Ken Raeburn.
 178
 179 RS/6000 and PowerPC support by Ian Taylor.
 180
 181 VMS command scripts (make-gas.com, config-gas.com) have been worked on a bit,
 182 based on mail received from various people.  The `-h#' option should work again
 183 too.
 184
 185 HP-PA work, by Jeff Law.  Note, for the PA, gas-2.3 has been designed to work
 186 with gdb-4.12 and gcc-2.6.  As gcc-2.6 has not been released yet, a special
 187 version of gcc-2.5.8 has been patched to work with gas-2.3.  You can retrieve
 188 this special version of gcc-2.5.8 via anonymous ftp from jaguar.cs.utah.edu
 189 in the "dist" directory.
 190
 191 Vax support in gas fixed for BSD, so it builds and seems to run a couple simple
 192 tests okay.  I haven't put it through extensive testing.  (GNU make is
 193 currently required for BSD 4.3 builds.)
 194
 195 Support for the DEC Alpha, running OSF/1 (ECOFF format).  The gas support is
 196 based on code donated by CMU, which used an a.out-based format.  I'm afraid the
 197 alpha-a.out support is pretty badly mangled, and much of it removed; making it
 198 work will require rewriting it as BFD support for the format anyways.
 199
 200 Irix 5 support.
 201
 202 The test suites have been fixed up a bit, so that they should work with a
 203 couple different versions of expect and dejagnu.
 204
 205 Symbols' values are now handled internally as expressions, permitting more
 206 flexibility in evaluating them in some cases.  Some details of relocation
 207 handling have also changed, and simple constant pool management has been added,
 208 to make the Alpha port easier.
 209
 210 New option "--statistics" for printing out program run times.  This is intended
 211 to be used with the gcc "-Q" option, which prints out times spent in various
 212 phases of compilation.  (You should be able to get all of them printed out with
 213 "gcc -Q -Wa,--statistics", I think.)
 214
 215 ----------------------------------------------------------------
 216
 217 Changes in 2.2:
 218
 219 RS/6000 AIX and MIPS SGI Irix 5 support has been added.
 220
 221 Configurations that are still in development (and therefore are convenient to
 222 have listed in configure.in) still get rejected without a minor change to
 223 gas/Makefile.in, so people not doing development work shouldn't get the
 224 impression that support for such configurations is actually believed to be
 225 reliable.
 226
 227 The program name (usually "as") is printed when a fatal error message is
 228 displayed.  This should prevent some confusion about the source of occasional
 229 messages about "internal errors".
 230
 231 ELF support is falling into place.  Support for the 386 should be working.
 232 Support for SPARC Solaris is in.  HPPA support from Utah is being integrated.
 233
 234 Symbol values are maintained as expressions instead of being immediately boiled
 235 down to add-symbol, sub-symbol, and constant.  This permits slightly more
 236 complex calculations involving symbols whose values are not alreadey known.
 237
 238 DBX-style debugging info ("stabs") is now supported for COFF formats.
 239 If any stabs directives are seen in the source, GAS will create two new
 240 sections: a ".stab" and a ".stabstr" section.  The format of the .stab
 241 section is nearly identical to the a.out symbol format, and .stabstr is
 242 its string table.  For this to be useful, you must have configured GCC
 243 to generate stabs (by defining DBX_DEBUGGING_INFO), and must have a GDB
 244 that can use the stab sections (4.11 or later).
 245
 246 LynxOS, on i386 and m68k platforms, is now supported.  SPARC LynxOS
 247 support is in progress.
 248
 249 ----------------------------------------------------------------
 250
 251 Changes in 2.1:
 252
 253 Several small fixes for i386-aix (PS/2) support from Minh Tran-Le have been
 254 incorporated, but not well tested yet.
 255
 256 Altered the opcode table split for m68k; it should require less VM to compile
 257 with gcc now.
 258
 259 Some minor adjustments to add (Convergent Technologies') Miniframe support,
 260 suggested by Ronald Cole.
 261
 262 HPPA support (running OSF only, not HPUX) has been contributed by Utah.  This
 263 includes improved ELF support, which I've started adapting for SPARC Solaris
 264 2.x.  Integration isn't completely, so it probably won't work.
 265
 266 HP9000/300 support, donated by HP, has been merged in.
 267
 268 Ian Taylor has finished the MIPS ECOFF (Ultrix, Irix) support.
 269
 270 Better error messages for unsupported configurations (e.g., hppa-hpux).
 271
 272 Test suite framework is starting to become reasonable.
 273
 274 ----------------------------------------------------------------
 275
 276 Changes in 2.0:
 277
 278 Mostly bug fixes.
 279
 280 Some more merging of BFD and ELF code, but ELF still doesn't work.
 281
 282 ----------------------------------------------------------------
 283
 284 Changes in 1.94:
 285
 286 BFD merge is partly done.  Adventurous souls may try giving configure the
 287 "--with-bfd-assembler" option.  Currently, ELF format requires it, a.out format
 288 accepts it; SPARC CPU accepts it.  It's the default only for OS "elf" or
 289 "solaris".  (ELF isn't really supported yet.  It needs work.  I've got some
 290 code from Utah for HP-PA ELF, and from DG for m88k ELF, but they're not fully
 291 merged yet.)
 292
 293 The 68K opcode table has been split in half.  It should now compile under gcc
 294 without consuming ridiculous amounts of memory.
 295
 296 A couple data structures have been reduced in size.  This should result in
 297 saving a little bit of space at runtime.
 298
 299 Support for MIPS, from OSF and Ralph Campbell, has been merged in.  The OSF
 300 code provided ROSE format support, which I haven't merged in yet.  (I can make
 301 it available, if anyone wants to try it out.)  Ralph's code, for BSD 4.4,
 302 supports a.out format.  We don't have ECOFF support in just yet; it's coming.
 303
 304 Support for the Hitachi H8/500 has been added.
 305
 306 VMS host and target support should be working now, thanks chiefly to Eric
 307 Youngdale.
 308
 309 ----------------------------------------------------------------
 310
 311 Changes in 1.93.01:
 312
 313 For m68k, support for more processors has been added: 68040, CPU32, 68851.
 314
 315 For i386, .align is now power-of-two; was number-of-bytes.
 316
 317 For m68k, "%" is now accepted before register names.  For COFF format, which
 318 doesn't use underscore prefixes for C labels, it is required, so variable "a0"
 319 can be distinguished from the register.
 320
 321 Last public release was 1.38.  Lots of configuration changes since then, lots
 322 of new CPUs and formats, lots of bugs fixed.
 323
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