NEWS revision 91041
1-*- text -*- 2Support for Don Knuth's MMIX, by Hans-Peter Nilsson. 3 4Support for the OpenRISC 32-bit embedded processor by OpenCores. 5 6The ARM assembler now accepts -march=..., -mcpu=... and -mfpu=... for 7specifying the target instruction set. The old method of specifying the 8target processor has been deprecated, but is still accepted for 9compatibility. 10 11Support for the VFP floating-point instruction set has been added to 12the ARM assembler. 13 14New psuedo op: .incbin to include a set of binary data at a given point 15in the assembly. Contributed by Anders Norlander. 16 17The MIPS assembler now accepts -march/-mtune. -mcpu has been deprecated 18but still works for compatability. 19 20The MIPS assembler no longer issues a warning by default when it 21generates a nop instruction from a macro. The new command line option 22-n will turn on the warning. 23 24Changes in 2.11: 25 26x86 gas now supports the full Pentium4 instruction set. 27 28Support for AMD x86-64 architecture, by Jan Hubicka, SuSE Labs. 29 30Support for Motorola 68HC11 and 68HC12. 31 32Support for Texas Instruments TMS320C54x (tic54x). 33 34Support for IA-64. 35 36Support for i860, by Jason Eckhardt. 37 38Support for CRIS (Axis Communications ETRAX series). 39 40x86 gas has a new .arch pseudo op to specify the target CPU architecture. 41 42x86 gas -q command line option quietens warnings about register size changes 43due to suffix, indirect jmp/call without `*', stand-alone prefixes, and 44translating various deprecated floating point instructions. 45 46Changes in 2.10: 47 48Support for the ARM msr instruction was changed to only allow an immediate 49operand when altering the flags field. 50 51Support for ATMEL AVR. 52 53Support for IBM 370 ELF. Somewhat experimental. 54 55Support for numbers with suffixes. 56 57Added support for breaking to the end of repeat loops. 58 59Added support for parallel instruction syntax (DOUBLEBAR_PARALLEL). 60 61New .elseif pseudo-op added. 62 63New --fatal-warnings option. 64 65picoJava architecture support added. 66 67Motorola MCore 210 processor support added. 68 69A new pseudo-op .intel_syntax has been implemented to allow gas to parse i386 70assembly programs with intel syntax. 71 72New pseudo-ops .func,.endfunc to aid in debugging user-written assembler code. 73 74Added -gdwarf2 option to generate DWARF 2 debugging information. 75 76Full 16-bit mode support for i386. 77 78Greatly improved instruction operand checking for i386. This change will 79produce errors or warnings on incorrect assembly code that previous versions of 80gas accepted. If you get unexpected messages from code that worked with older 81versions of gas, please double check the code before reporting a bug. 82 83Weak symbol support added for COFF targets. 84 85Mitsubishi D30V support added. 86 87Texas Instruments c80 (tms320c80) support added. 88 89i960 ELF support added. 90 91ARM ELF support added. 92 93Changes in 2.9: 94 95Texas Instruments c30 (tms320c30) support added. 96 97The assembler now optimizes the exception frame information generated by egcs 98and gcc 2.8. The new --traditional-format option disables this optimization. 99 100Added --gstabs option to generate stabs debugging information. 101 102The -a option takes a new suboption, m (e.g., -alm) to expand macros in a 103listing. 104 105Added -MD option to print dependencies. 106 107Changes in 2.8: 108 109BeOS support added. 110 111MIPS16 support added. 112 113Motorola ColdFire 5200 support added (configure for m68k and use -m5200). 114 115Alpha/VMS support added. 116 117m68k options --base-size-default-16, --base-size-default-32, 118--disp-size-default-16, and --disp-size-default-32 added. 119 120The alignment directives now take an optional third argument, which is the 121maximum number of bytes to skip. If doing the alignment would require skipping 122more than the given number of bytes, the alignment is not done at all. 123 124The ELF assembler has a new pseudo-op, .symver, used for symbol versioning. 125 126The -a option takes a new suboption, c (e.g., -alc), to skip false conditionals 127in listings. 128 129Added new pseudo-op, .equiv; it's like .equ, except that it is an error if the 130symbol is already defined. 131 132Changes in 2.7: 133 134The PowerPC assembler now allows the use of symbolic register names (r0, etc.) 135if -mregnames is used. Symbolic names preceded by a '%' (%r0, etc.) can be 136used any time. PowerPC 860 move to/from SPR instructions have been added. 137 138Alpha Linux (ELF) support added. 139 140PowerPC ELF support added. 141 142m68k Linux (ELF) support added. 143 144i960 Hx/Jx support added. 145 146i386/PowerPC gnu-win32 support added. 147 148SCO ELF support added. For OpenServer 5 targets (i386-unknown-sco3.2v5) the 149default is to build COFF-only support. To get a set of tools that generate ELF 150(they'll understand both COFF and ELF), you must configure with 151target=i386-unknown-sco3.2v5elf. 152 153m88k-motorola-sysv3* support added. 154 155Changes in 2.6: 156 157Gas now directly supports macros, without requiring GASP. 158 159Gas now has an MRI assembler compatibility mode. Use -M or --mri to select MRI 160mode. The pseudo-op ``.mri 1'' will switch into the MRI mode until the ``.mri 1610'' is seen; this can be convenient for inline assembler code. 162 163Added --defsym SYM=VALUE option. 164 165Added -mips4 support to MIPS assembler. 166 167Added PIC support to Solaris and SPARC SunOS 4 assembler. 168 169Changes in 2.4: 170 171Converted this directory to use an autoconf-generated configure script. 172 173ARM support, from Richard Earnshaw. 174 175Updated VMS support, from Pat Rankin, including considerably improved debugging 176support. 177 178Support for the control registers in the 68060. 179 180Handles (ignores) a new directive ".this_GCC_requires_the_GNU_assembler", to 181provide for possible future gcc changes, for targets where gas provides some 182features not available in the native assembler. If the native assembler is 183used, it should become obvious pretty quickly what the problem is. 184 185Usage message is available with "--help". 186 187The GNU Assembler Preprocessor (gasp) is included. (Actually, it was in 2.3 188also, but didn't get into the NEWS file.) 189 190Weak symbol support for a.out. 191 192A bug in the listing code which could cause an infinite loop has been fixed. 193Bugs in listings when generating a COFF object file have also been fixed. 194 195Initial i386-svr4 PIC implementation from Eric Youngdale, based on code by Paul 196Kranenburg. 197 198Improved Alpha support. Immediate constants can have a much larger range now. 199Support for the 21164 has been contributed by Digital. 200 201Updated ns32k (pc532-mach, netbsd532) support from Ian Dall. 202 203Changes in 2.3: 204 205Mach i386 support, by David Mackenzie and Ken Raeburn. 206 207RS/6000 and PowerPC support by Ian Taylor. 208 209VMS command scripts (make-gas.com, config-gas.com) have been worked on a bit, 210based on mail received from various people. The `-h#' option should work again 211too. 212 213HP-PA work, by Jeff Law. Note, for the PA, gas-2.3 has been designed to work 214with gdb-4.12 and gcc-2.6. As gcc-2.6 has not been released yet, a special 215version of gcc-2.5.8 has been patched to work with gas-2.3. You can retrieve 216this special version of gcc-2.5.8 via anonymous ftp from jaguar.cs.utah.edu 217in the "dist" directory. 218 219Vax support in gas fixed for BSD, so it builds and seems to run a couple simple 220tests okay. I haven't put it through extensive testing. (GNU make is 221currently required for BSD 4.3 builds.) 222 223Support for the DEC Alpha, running OSF/1 (ECOFF format). The gas support is 224based on code donated by CMU, which used an a.out-based format. I'm afraid the 225alpha-a.out support is pretty badly mangled, and much of it removed; making it 226work will require rewriting it as BFD support for the format anyways. 227 228Irix 5 support. 229 230The test suites have been fixed up a bit, so that they should work with a 231couple different versions of expect and dejagnu. 232 233Symbols' values are now handled internally as expressions, permitting more 234flexibility in evaluating them in some cases. Some details of relocation 235handling have also changed, and simple constant pool management has been added, 236to make the Alpha port easier. 237 238New option "--statistics" for printing out program run times. This is intended 239to be used with the gcc "-Q" option, which prints out times spent in various 240phases of compilation. (You should be able to get all of them printed out with 241"gcc -Q -Wa,--statistics", I think.) 242 243---------------------------------------------------------------- 244 245Changes in 2.2: 246 247RS/6000 AIX and MIPS SGI Irix 5 support has been added. 248 249Configurations that are still in development (and therefore are convenient to 250have listed in configure.in) still get rejected without a minor change to 251gas/Makefile.in, so people not doing development work shouldn't get the 252impression that support for such configurations is actually believed to be 253reliable. 254 255The program name (usually "as") is printed when a fatal error message is 256displayed. This should prevent some confusion about the source of occasional 257messages about "internal errors". 258 259ELF support is falling into place. Support for the 386 should be working. 260Support for SPARC Solaris is in. HPPA support from Utah is being integrated. 261 262Symbol values are maintained as expressions instead of being immediately boiled 263down to add-symbol, sub-symbol, and constant. This permits slightly more 264complex calculations involving symbols whose values are not alreadey known. 265 266DBX-style debugging info ("stabs") is now supported for COFF formats. 267If any stabs directives are seen in the source, GAS will create two new 268sections: a ".stab" and a ".stabstr" section. The format of the .stab 269section is nearly identical to the a.out symbol format, and .stabstr is 270its string table. For this to be useful, you must have configured GCC 271to generate stabs (by defining DBX_DEBUGGING_INFO), and must have a GDB 272that can use the stab sections (4.11 or later). 273 274LynxOS, on i386 and m68k platforms, is now supported. SPARC LynxOS 275support is in progress. 276 277---------------------------------------------------------------- 278 279Changes in 2.1: 280 281Several small fixes for i386-aix (PS/2) support from Minh Tran-Le have been 282incorporated, but not well tested yet. 283 284Altered the opcode table split for m68k; it should require less VM to compile 285with gcc now. 286 287Some minor adjustments to add (Convergent Technologies') Miniframe support, 288suggested by Ronald Cole. 289 290HPPA support (running OSF only, not HPUX) has been contributed by Utah. This 291includes improved ELF support, which I've started adapting for SPARC Solaris 2922.x. Integration isn't completely, so it probably won't work. 293 294HP9000/300 support, donated by HP, has been merged in. 295 296Ian Taylor has finished the MIPS ECOFF (Ultrix, Irix) support. 297 298Better error messages for unsupported configurations (e.g., hppa-hpux). 299 300Test suite framework is starting to become reasonable. 301 302---------------------------------------------------------------- 303 304Changes in 2.0: 305 306Mostly bug fixes. 307 308Some more merging of BFD and ELF code, but ELF still doesn't work. 309 310---------------------------------------------------------------- 311 312Changes in 1.94: 313 314BFD merge is partly done. Adventurous souls may try giving configure the 315"--with-bfd-assembler" option. Currently, ELF format requires it, a.out format 316accepts it; SPARC CPU accepts it. It's the default only for OS "elf" or 317"solaris". (ELF isn't really supported yet. It needs work. I've got some 318code from Utah for HP-PA ELF, and from DG for m88k ELF, but they're not fully 319merged yet.) 320 321The 68K opcode table has been split in half. It should now compile under gcc 322without consuming ridiculous amounts of memory. 323 324A couple data structures have been reduced in size. This should result in 325saving a little bit of space at runtime. 326 327Support for MIPS, from OSF and Ralph Campbell, has been merged in. The OSF 328code provided ROSE format support, which I haven't merged in yet. (I can make 329it available, if anyone wants to try it out.) Ralph's code, for BSD 4.4, 330supports a.out format. We don't have ECOFF support in just yet; it's coming. 331 332Support for the Hitachi H8/500 has been added. 333 334VMS host and target support should be working now, thanks chiefly to Eric 335Youngdale. 336 337---------------------------------------------------------------- 338 339Changes in 1.93.01: 340 341For m68k, support for more processors has been added: 68040, CPU32, 68851. 342 343For i386, .align is now power-of-two; was number-of-bytes. 344 345For m68k, "%" is now accepted before register names. For COFF format, which 346doesn't use underscore prefixes for C labels, it is required, so variable "a0" 347can be distinguished from the register. 348 349Last public release was 1.38. Lots of configuration changes since then, lots 350of new CPUs and formats, lots of bugs fixed. 351 352 353Local variables: 354fill-column: 79 355End: 356