Toolchain Update for 4.9.1?

[Ralf Corsepius]

On Tue, 2008-12-02 at 11:20 -0600, Joel Sherrill wrote:
> Ralf Corsepius wrote:
> > On Tue, 2008-12-02 at 10:45 +0100, Sebastian Huber wrote:
> >   
> >> Hi,
> >>
> >> there are two bugs in the current binutils of 4.9 that are can be solved
> >>  with an upgrade (the current 4.10 version for example):
> >>
> >> http://sourceware.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=2864
> >> http://sourceware.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=5006
> >>
> >> http://sourceware.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=6888
> >>
> >> The first bug may cause great headaches if you work with hand written
> >> linker command and assembler files.
> >>
> >> A segmentation fault in a common PowerPC linker situation is also not
> >> very desirable.
> >>     
> >
> > Well, I am not sure if I understand correctly.
> >
> > Is this a request to upgrade binutils to binutils-2.19 for all targets
> > or a request to upgrade the powerpc-binutils?
> >
> > The former is unlikely to happen, and if only after extensive testing.
> > The latter might worth consideration, should there be agreement on this
> > by all active powerpc-rtems4.9 users.
> >
> > Joel, do you recall any major binutils-2.18/binutils-2.19
> > incompatibilities rsp. have they been backported to rtems-4.9?
> >
> > IIRC, there had been some, but the details have escaped me.
> >
> >   
> I honestly don't remember any. 
I vaguely recall something affecting __start, and some new sections in
binutils's linker scripts.


> Would it be possible to spin them
Yes.

>  and place them in 4.9-testing?
No, the overhead would be too much.

An experiment coming very close this, due to the similarity of the
toolchains would be building rtems-4.9 with the rtems-4.10 toolchains.

> >> The GCCs for version 4.9 and 4.10 have currently the same basis (4.3.2)
> >> and differ only in the patch files.  The current 4.10 patch contains a
> >> fix for the relocation data problem in the PowerPC multilibs:
> >>
> >> http://www.rtems.com/ml/rtems-users/2008/september/msg00102.html
> >>
> >> It would be nice if the 4.9 GCC can include this fix too.
> >>     
> > Applying this patch would change the ABI of the powerpc toolchain.
> >
> > I.e. unless we agree upon making an exception to our release policies
> > ("No API nor ABI changes"), there is hardly any possibility to make this
> > change happen.
> >
> > Powerpc users, please speak up !!!!
> >   
> I don't remember there being any issues at all moving from
> 4.9 tools to 4.10. 
Let me emphasize: These toolchains are similar but not identical.

>  Before the recent newlib changes I would
> sometimes build the head with 4.9 tools and the 4.9 branch
> with 4.10 tools.
It should still work.

Ralf