NEWS revision 89857
1-*- text -*- 2The ARM assembler now accepts -march=..., -mcpu=... and -mfpu=... for 3specifying the target instruction set. The old method of specifying the 4target processor has been deprecated, but is still accepted for 5compatibility. 6 7Support for the VFP floating-point instruction set has been added to 8the ARM assembler. 9 10New psuedo op: .incbin to include a set of binary data at a given point 11in the assembly. Contributed by Anders Norlander. 12 13The MIPS assembler now accepts -march/-mtune. -mcpu has been deprecated 14but still works for compatability. 15 16The MIPS assembler no longer issues a warning by default when it 17generates a nop instruction from a macro. The new command line option 18-n will turn on the warning. 19 20Changes in 2.11: 21 22x86 gas now supports the full Pentium4 instruction set. 23 24Support for AMD x86-64 architecture, by Jan Hubicka, SuSE Labs. 25 26Support for Motorola 68HC11 and 68HC12. 27 28Support for Texas Instruments TMS320C54x (tic54x). 29 30Support for IA-64. 31 32Support for i860, by Jason Eckhardt. 33 34Support for CRIS (Axis Communications ETRAX series). 35 36x86 gas has a new .arch pseudo op to specify the target CPU architecture. 37 38x86 gas -q command line option quietens warnings about register size changes 39due to suffix, indirect jmp/call without `*', stand-alone prefixes, and 40translating various deprecated floating point instructions. 41 42Changes in 2.10: 43 44Support for the ARM msr instruction was changed to only allow an immediate 45operand when altering the flags field. 46 47Support for ATMEL AVR. 48 49Support for IBM 370 ELF. Somewhat experimental. 50 51Support for numbers with suffixes. 52 53Added support for breaking to the end of repeat loops. 54 55Added support for parallel instruction syntax (DOUBLEBAR_PARALLEL). 56 57New .elseif pseudo-op added. 58 59New --fatal-warnings option. 60 61picoJava architecture support added. 62 63Motorola MCore 210 processor support added. 64 65A new pseudo-op .intel_syntax has been implemented to allow gas to parse i386 66assembly programs with intel syntax. 67 68New pseudo-ops .func,.endfunc to aid in debugging user-written assembler code. 69 70Added -gdwarf2 option to generate DWARF 2 debugging information. 71 72Full 16-bit mode support for i386. 73 74Greatly improved instruction operand checking for i386. This change will 75produce errors or warnings on incorrect assembly code that previous versions of 76gas accepted. If you get unexpected messages from code that worked with older 77versions of gas, please double check the code before reporting a bug. 78 79Weak symbol support added for COFF targets. 80 81Mitsubishi D30V support added. 82 83Texas Instruments c80 (tms320c80) support added. 84 85i960 ELF support added. 86 87ARM ELF support added. 88 89Changes in 2.9: 90 91Texas Instruments c30 (tms320c30) support added. 92 93The assembler now optimizes the exception frame information generated by egcs 94and gcc 2.8. The new --traditional-format option disables this optimization. 95 96Added --gstabs option to generate stabs debugging information. 97 98The -a option takes a new suboption, m (e.g., -alm) to expand macros in a 99listing. 100 101Added -MD option to print dependencies. 102 103Changes in 2.8: 104 105BeOS support added. 106 107MIPS16 support added. 108 109Motorola ColdFire 5200 support added (configure for m68k and use -m5200). 110 111Alpha/VMS support added. 112 113m68k options --base-size-default-16, --base-size-default-32, 114--disp-size-default-16, and --disp-size-default-32 added. 115 116The alignment directives now take an optional third argument, which is the 117maximum number of bytes to skip. If doing the alignment would require skipping 118more than the given number of bytes, the alignment is not done at all. 119 120The ELF assembler has a new pseudo-op, .symver, used for symbol versioning. 121 122The -a option takes a new suboption, c (e.g., -alc), to skip false conditionals 123in listings. 124 125Added new pseudo-op, .equiv; it's like .equ, except that it is an error if the 126symbol is already defined. 127 128Changes in 2.7: 129 130The PowerPC assembler now allows the use of symbolic register names (r0, etc.) 131if -mregnames is used. Symbolic names preceded by a '%' (%r0, etc.) can be 132used any time. PowerPC 860 move to/from SPR instructions have been added. 133 134Alpha Linux (ELF) support added. 135 136PowerPC ELF support added. 137 138m68k Linux (ELF) support added. 139 140i960 Hx/Jx support added. 141 142i386/PowerPC gnu-win32 support added. 143 144SCO ELF support added. For OpenServer 5 targets (i386-unknown-sco3.2v5) the 145default is to build COFF-only support. To get a set of tools that generate ELF 146(they'll understand both COFF and ELF), you must configure with 147target=i386-unknown-sco3.2v5elf. 148 149m88k-motorola-sysv3* support added. 150 151Changes in 2.6: 152 153Gas now directly supports macros, without requiring GASP. 154 155Gas now has an MRI assembler compatibility mode. Use -M or --mri to select MRI 156mode. The pseudo-op ``.mri 1'' will switch into the MRI mode until the ``.mri 1570'' is seen; this can be convenient for inline assembler code. 158 159Added --defsym SYM=VALUE option. 160 161Added -mips4 support to MIPS assembler. 162 163Added PIC support to Solaris and SPARC SunOS 4 assembler. 164 165Changes in 2.4: 166 167Converted this directory to use an autoconf-generated configure script. 168 169ARM support, from Richard Earnshaw. 170 171Updated VMS support, from Pat Rankin, including considerably improved debugging 172support. 173 174Support for the control registers in the 68060. 175 176Handles (ignores) a new directive ".this_GCC_requires_the_GNU_assembler", to 177provide for possible future gcc changes, for targets where gas provides some 178features not available in the native assembler. If the native assembler is 179used, it should become obvious pretty quickly what the problem is. 180 181Usage message is available with "--help". 182 183The GNU Assembler Preprocessor (gasp) is included. (Actually, it was in 2.3 184also, but didn't get into the NEWS file.) 185 186Weak symbol support for a.out. 187 188A bug in the listing code which could cause an infinite loop has been fixed. 189Bugs in listings when generating a COFF object file have also been fixed. 190 191Initial i386-svr4 PIC implementation from Eric Youngdale, based on code by Paul 192Kranenburg. 193 194Improved Alpha support. Immediate constants can have a much larger range now. 195Support for the 21164 has been contributed by Digital. 196 197Updated ns32k (pc532-mach, netbsd532) support from Ian Dall. 198 199Changes in 2.3: 200 201Mach i386 support, by David Mackenzie and Ken Raeburn. 202 203RS/6000 and PowerPC support by Ian Taylor. 204 205VMS command scripts (make-gas.com, config-gas.com) have been worked on a bit, 206based on mail received from various people. The `-h#' option should work again 207too. 208 209HP-PA work, by Jeff Law. Note, for the PA, gas-2.3 has been designed to work 210with gdb-4.12 and gcc-2.6. As gcc-2.6 has not been released yet, a special 211version of gcc-2.5.8 has been patched to work with gas-2.3. You can retrieve 212this special version of gcc-2.5.8 via anonymous ftp from jaguar.cs.utah.edu 213in the "dist" directory. 214 215Vax support in gas fixed for BSD, so it builds and seems to run a couple simple 216tests okay. I haven't put it through extensive testing. (GNU make is 217currently required for BSD 4.3 builds.) 218 219Support for the DEC Alpha, running OSF/1 (ECOFF format). The gas support is 220based on code donated by CMU, which used an a.out-based format. I'm afraid the 221alpha-a.out support is pretty badly mangled, and much of it removed; making it 222work will require rewriting it as BFD support for the format anyways. 223 224Irix 5 support. 225 226The test suites have been fixed up a bit, so that they should work with a 227couple different versions of expect and dejagnu. 228 229Symbols' values are now handled internally as expressions, permitting more 230flexibility in evaluating them in some cases. Some details of relocation 231handling have also changed, and simple constant pool management has been added, 232to make the Alpha port easier. 233 234New option "--statistics" for printing out program run times. This is intended 235to be used with the gcc "-Q" option, which prints out times spent in various 236phases of compilation. (You should be able to get all of them printed out with 237"gcc -Q -Wa,--statistics", I think.) 238 239---------------------------------------------------------------- 240 241Changes in 2.2: 242 243RS/6000 AIX and MIPS SGI Irix 5 support has been added. 244 245Configurations that are still in development (and therefore are convenient to 246have listed in configure.in) still get rejected without a minor change to 247gas/Makefile.in, so people not doing development work shouldn't get the 248impression that support for such configurations is actually believed to be 249reliable. 250 251The program name (usually "as") is printed when a fatal error message is 252displayed. This should prevent some confusion about the source of occasional 253messages about "internal errors". 254 255ELF support is falling into place. Support for the 386 should be working. 256Support for SPARC Solaris is in. HPPA support from Utah is being integrated. 257 258Symbol values are maintained as expressions instead of being immediately boiled 259down to add-symbol, sub-symbol, and constant. This permits slightly more 260complex calculations involving symbols whose values are not alreadey known. 261 262DBX-style debugging info ("stabs") is now supported for COFF formats. 263If any stabs directives are seen in the source, GAS will create two new 264sections: a ".stab" and a ".stabstr" section. The format of the .stab 265section is nearly identical to the a.out symbol format, and .stabstr is 266its string table. For this to be useful, you must have configured GCC 267to generate stabs (by defining DBX_DEBUGGING_INFO), and must have a GDB 268that can use the stab sections (4.11 or later). 269 270LynxOS, on i386 and m68k platforms, is now supported. SPARC LynxOS 271support is in progress. 272 273---------------------------------------------------------------- 274 275Changes in 2.1: 276 277Several small fixes for i386-aix (PS/2) support from Minh Tran-Le have been 278incorporated, but not well tested yet. 279 280Altered the opcode table split for m68k; it should require less VM to compile 281with gcc now. 282 283Some minor adjustments to add (Convergent Technologies') Miniframe support, 284suggested by Ronald Cole. 285 286HPPA support (running OSF only, not HPUX) has been contributed by Utah. This 287includes improved ELF support, which I've started adapting for SPARC Solaris 2882.x. Integration isn't completely, so it probably won't work. 289 290HP9000/300 support, donated by HP, has been merged in. 291 292Ian Taylor has finished the MIPS ECOFF (Ultrix, Irix) support. 293 294Better error messages for unsupported configurations (e.g., hppa-hpux). 295 296Test suite framework is starting to become reasonable. 297 298---------------------------------------------------------------- 299 300Changes in 2.0: 301 302Mostly bug fixes. 303 304Some more merging of BFD and ELF code, but ELF still doesn't work. 305 306---------------------------------------------------------------- 307 308Changes in 1.94: 309 310BFD merge is partly done. Adventurous souls may try giving configure the 311"--with-bfd-assembler" option. Currently, ELF format requires it, a.out format 312accepts it; SPARC CPU accepts it. It's the default only for OS "elf" or 313"solaris". (ELF isn't really supported yet. It needs work. I've got some 314code from Utah for HP-PA ELF, and from DG for m88k ELF, but they're not fully 315merged yet.) 316 317The 68K opcode table has been split in half. It should now compile under gcc 318without consuming ridiculous amounts of memory. 319 320A couple data structures have been reduced in size. This should result in 321saving a little bit of space at runtime. 322 323Support for MIPS, from OSF and Ralph Campbell, has been merged in. The OSF 324code provided ROSE format support, which I haven't merged in yet. (I can make 325it available, if anyone wants to try it out.) Ralph's code, for BSD 4.4, 326supports a.out format. We don't have ECOFF support in just yet; it's coming. 327 328Support for the Hitachi H8/500 has been added. 329 330VMS host and target support should be working now, thanks chiefly to Eric 331Youngdale. 332 333---------------------------------------------------------------- 334 335Changes in 1.93.01: 336 337For m68k, support for more processors has been added: 68040, CPU32, 68851. 338 339For i386, .align is now power-of-two; was number-of-bytes. 340 341For m68k, "%" is now accepted before register names. For COFF format, which 342doesn't use underscore prefixes for C labels, it is required, so variable "a0" 343can be distinguished from the register. 344 345Last public release was 1.38. Lots of configuration changes since then, lots 346of new CPUs and formats, lots of bugs fixed. 347 348 349Local variables: 350fill-column: 79 351End: 352