Toolchain Update for 4.9.1?

[Ralf Corsepius]

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.

> 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 !!!!

Ralf