NEWS revision 60484
1-*- text -*- 2 3Changes in 2.10: 4 5Support for ATMEL AVR. 6 7Support for IBM 370 ELF. Somewhat experimental. 8 9Support for numbers with suffixes. 10 11Added support for breaking to the end of repeat loops. 12 13Added support for parallel instruction syntax (DOUBLEBAR_PARALLEL). 14 15New .elseif pseudo-op added. 16 17New --fatal-warnings option. 18 19picoJava architecture support added. 20 21Motorola MCore 210 processor support added. 22 23A new pseudo-op .intel_syntax has been implemented to allow gas to parse i386 24assembly programs with intel syntax. 25 26New pseudo-ops .func,.endfunc to aid in debugging user-written assembler code. 27 28Added -gdwarf2 option to generate DWARF 2 debugging information. 29 30Full 16-bit mode support for i386. 31 32Greatly improved instruction operand checking for i386. This change will 33produce errors or warnings on incorrect assembly code that previous versions of 34gas accepted. If you get unexpected messages from code that worked with older 35versions of gas, please double check the code before reporting a bug. 36 37Weak symbol support added for COFF targets. 38 39Mitsubishi D30V support added. 40 41Texas Instruments c80 (tms320c80) support added. 42 43i960 ELF support added. 44 45Changes in 2.9: 46 47Texas Instruments c30 (tms320c30) support added. 48 49The assembler now optimizes the exception frame information generated by egcs 50and gcc 2.8. The new --traditional-format option disables this optimization. 51 52Added --gstabs option to generate stabs debugging information. 53 54The -a option takes a new suboption, m (e.g., -alm) to expand macros in a 55listing. 56 57Added -MD option to print dependencies. 58 59Changes in 2.8: 60 61BeOS support added. 62 63MIPS16 support added. 64 65Motorola ColdFire 5200 support added (configure for m68k and use -m5200). 66 67Alpha/VMS support added. 68 69m68k options --base-size-default-16, --base-size-default-32, 70--disp-size-default-16, and --disp-size-default-32 added. 71 72The alignment directives now take an optional third argument, which is the 73maximum number of bytes to skip. If doing the alignment would require skipping 74more than the given number of bytes, the alignment is not done at all. 75 76The ELF assembler has a new pseudo-op, .symver, used for symbol versioning. 77 78The -a option takes a new suboption, c (e.g., -alc), to skip false conditionals 79in listings. 80 81Added new pseudo-op, .equiv; it's like .equ, except that it is an error if the 82symbol is already defined. 83 84Changes in 2.7: 85 86The PowerPC assembler now allows the use of symbolic register names (r0, etc.) 87if -mregnames is used. Symbolic names preceded by a '%' (%r0, etc.) can be 88used any time. PowerPC 860 move to/from SPR instructions have been added. 89 90Alpha Linux (ELF) support added. 91 92PowerPC ELF support added. 93 94m68k Linux (ELF) support added. 95 96i960 Hx/Jx support added. 97 98i386/PowerPC gnu-win32 support added. 99 100SCO ELF support added. For OpenServer 5 targets (i386-unknown-sco3.2v5) the 101default is to build COFF-only support. To get a set of tools that generate ELF 102(they'll understand both COFF and ELF), you must configure with 103target=i386-unknown-sco3.2v5elf. 104 105m88k-motorola-sysv3* support added. 106 107Changes in 2.6: 108 109Gas now directly supports macros, without requiring GASP. 110 111Gas now has an MRI assembler compatibility mode. Use -M or --mri to select MRI 112mode. The pseudo-op ``.mri 1'' will switch into the MRI mode until the ``.mri 1130'' is seen; this can be convenient for inline assembler code. 114 115Added --defsym SYM=VALUE option. 116 117Added -mips4 support to MIPS assembler. 118 119Added PIC support to Solaris and SPARC SunOS 4 assembler. 120 121Changes in 2.4: 122 123Converted this directory to use an autoconf-generated configure script. 124 125ARM support, from Richard Earnshaw. 126 127Updated VMS support, from Pat Rankin, including considerably improved debugging 128support. 129 130Support for the control registers in the 68060. 131 132Handles (ignores) a new directive ".this_GCC_requires_the_GNU_assembler", to 133provide for possible future gcc changes, for targets where gas provides some 134features not available in the native assembler. If the native assembler is 135used, it should become obvious pretty quickly what the problem is. 136 137Usage message is available with "--help". 138 139The GNU Assembler Preprocessor (gasp) is included. (Actually, it was in 2.3 140also, but didn't get into the NEWS file.) 141 142Weak symbol support for a.out. 143 144A bug in the listing code which could cause an infinite loop has been fixed. 145Bugs in listings when generating a COFF object file have also been fixed. 146 147Initial i386-svr4 PIC implementation from Eric Youngdale, based on code by Paul 148Kranenburg. 149 150Improved Alpha support. Immediate constants can have a much larger range now. 151Support for the 21164 has been contributed by Digital. 152 153Updated ns32k (pc532-mach, netbsd532) support from Ian Dall. 154 155Changes in 2.3: 156 157Mach i386 support, by David Mackenzie and Ken Raeburn. 158 159RS/6000 and PowerPC support by Ian Taylor. 160 161VMS command scripts (make-gas.com, config-gas.com) have been worked on a bit, 162based on mail received from various people. The `-h#' option should work again 163too. 164 165HP-PA work, by Jeff Law. Note, for the PA, gas-2.3 has been designed to work 166with gdb-4.12 and gcc-2.6. As gcc-2.6 has not been released yet, a special 167version of gcc-2.5.8 has been patched to work with gas-2.3. You can retrieve 168this special version of gcc-2.5.8 via anonymous ftp from jaguar.cs.utah.edu 169in the "dist" directory. 170 171Vax support in gas fixed for BSD, so it builds and seems to run a couple simple 172tests okay. I haven't put it through extensive testing. (GNU make is 173currently required for BSD 4.3 builds.) 174 175Support for the DEC Alpha, running OSF/1 (ECOFF format). The gas support is 176based on code donated by CMU, which used an a.out-based format. I'm afraid the 177alpha-a.out support is pretty badly mangled, and much of it removed; making it 178work will require rewriting it as BFD support for the format anyways. 179 180Irix 5 support. 181 182The test suites have been fixed up a bit, so that they should work with a 183couple different versions of expect and dejagnu. 184 185Symbols' values are now handled internally as expressions, permitting more 186flexibility in evaluating them in some cases. Some details of relocation 187handling have also changed, and simple constant pool management has been added, 188to make the Alpha port easier. 189 190New option "--statistics" for printing out program run times. This is intended 191to be used with the gcc "-Q" option, which prints out times spent in various 192phases of compilation. (You should be able to get all of them printed out with 193"gcc -Q -Wa,--statistics", I think.) 194 195---------------------------------------------------------------- 196 197Changes in 2.2: 198 199RS/6000 AIX and MIPS SGI Irix 5 support has been added. 200 201Configurations that are still in development (and therefore are convenient to 202have listed in configure.in) still get rejected without a minor change to 203gas/Makefile.in, so people not doing development work shouldn't get the 204impression that support for such configurations is actually believed to be 205reliable. 206 207The program name (usually "as") is printed when a fatal error message is 208displayed. This should prevent some confusion about the source of occasional 209messages about "internal errors". 210 211ELF support is falling into place. Support for the 386 should be working. 212Support for SPARC Solaris is in. HPPA support from Utah is being integrated. 213 214Symbol values are maintained as expressions instead of being immediately boiled 215down to add-symbol, sub-symbol, and constant. This permits slightly more 216complex calculations involving symbols whose values are not alreadey known. 217 218DBX-style debugging info ("stabs") is now supported for COFF formats. 219If any stabs directives are seen in the source, GAS will create two new 220sections: a ".stab" and a ".stabstr" section. The format of the .stab 221section is nearly identical to the a.out symbol format, and .stabstr is 222its string table. For this to be useful, you must have configured GCC 223to generate stabs (by defining DBX_DEBUGGING_INFO), and must have a GDB 224that can use the stab sections (4.11 or later). 225 226LynxOS, on i386 and m68k platforms, is now supported. SPARC LynxOS 227support is in progress. 228 229---------------------------------------------------------------- 230 231Changes in 2.1: 232 233Several small fixes for i386-aix (PS/2) support from Minh Tran-Le have been 234incorporated, but not well tested yet. 235 236Altered the opcode table split for m68k; it should require less VM to compile 237with gcc now. 238 239Some minor adjustments to add (Convergent Technologies') Miniframe support, 240suggested by Ronald Cole. 241 242HPPA support (running OSF only, not HPUX) has been contributed by Utah. This 243includes improved ELF support, which I've started adapting for SPARC Solaris 2442.x. Integration isn't completely, so it probably won't work. 245 246HP9000/300 support, donated by HP, has been merged in. 247 248Ian Taylor has finished the MIPS ECOFF (Ultrix, Irix) support. 249 250Better error messages for unsupported configurations (e.g., hppa-hpux). 251 252Test suite framework is starting to become reasonable. 253 254---------------------------------------------------------------- 255 256Changes in 2.0: 257 258Mostly bug fixes. 259 260Some more merging of BFD and ELF code, but ELF still doesn't work. 261 262---------------------------------------------------------------- 263 264Changes in 1.94: 265 266BFD merge is partly done. Adventurous souls may try giving configure the 267"--with-bfd-assembler" option. Currently, ELF format requires it, a.out format 268accepts it; SPARC CPU accepts it. It's the default only for OS "elf" or 269"solaris". (ELF isn't really supported yet. It needs work. I've got some 270code from Utah for HP-PA ELF, and from DG for m88k ELF, but they're not fully 271merged yet.) 272 273The 68K opcode table has been split in half. It should now compile under gcc 274without consuming ridiculous amounts of memory. 275 276A couple data structures have been reduced in size. This should result in 277saving a little bit of space at runtime. 278 279Support for MIPS, from OSF and Ralph Campbell, has been merged in. The OSF 280code provided ROSE format support, which I haven't merged in yet. (I can make 281it available, if anyone wants to try it out.) Ralph's code, for BSD 4.4, 282supports a.out format. We don't have ECOFF support in just yet; it's coming. 283 284Support for the Hitachi H8/500 has been added. 285 286VMS host and target support should be working now, thanks chiefly to Eric 287Youngdale. 288 289---------------------------------------------------------------- 290 291Changes in 1.93.01: 292 293For m68k, support for more processors has been added: 68040, CPU32, 68851. 294 295For i386, .align is now power-of-two; was number-of-bytes. 296 297For m68k, "%" is now accepted before register names. For COFF format, which 298doesn't use underscore prefixes for C labels, it is required, so variable "a0" 299can be distinguished from the register. 300 301Last public release was 1.38. Lots of configuration changes since then, lots 302of new CPUs and formats, lots of bugs fixed. 303 304 305Local variables: 306fill-column: 79 307End: 308