Windows tools produce different binary files

[Ian Caddy]

Hi All,

Mick Davis and I have been working through the issue of the mingw gcc 
(4.1.1) compiler (same executable) creating different output files on 
Windows XP machines to Windows 2000 machines under the mingw 
environment.  We use the Coldfire cross compiler.

It has turned out to be a register optimisation problem.  For some 
reason on the Windows 2000 machines, the location of local variables on 
the stack is placed in a different position to the XP built application.

We have narrowed it down to the way qsort functions between the 2 
different OSes.

In our cut down example code that fails, we have 9 local variables.  The 
size of all the variables, except the first one is 4 bytes.  The first 
variable size is 2 bytes.  In gcc (file gcc/cfgexpand.c) function 
partition_stack_vars these variables are sorted based on size using 
qsort.  They are already sorted effectively.

On the XP machine, the order is unchanged (0(size2) ,1(size4) ,2(size4) 
,3(size4) ,4(size4) ,5(size4) ,6(size4) ,7(size4) ,8(size4) ) , but on 
the Win2K machine, the order is changed to 0,2,3,1,4,5,6,7,8.

I wrote a small problem which I compiled using mingw gcc and ran the exe 
on both machines.  It starts with an array of 9 values that are already 
sorted with the first value of 2 and the rest of 4.

I get different results running it on the XP machine to the Win2K 
machine, the same as our cross compiler problem, on the XP machine the 
order is unchanged (0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8), but on the 2000 machine, the 
index is now 0,2,3,1,4,5,6,7,8.  It looks like there is a problem with 
the underlying OS qsort which is being called through the msys enivronment.

Since our user base uses both Windows XP and Windows 2000, we need to 
support both platforms with identical output results.  We are currently 
trying to put our own version of qsort into gcc, to see if this fixes 
the problem.

regards,

Ian Caddy.


-- 
Ian Caddy
Goanna Technologies Pty Ltd
+61 8 9221 1860