gas/NEWS

   1 -*- text -*-
   2
   3 Changes in 2.10:
   4
   5 Support for the Motorolla MCore 210 processor added.
   6
   7 A new pseudo-op .intel_syntax has been implemented to allow gas to parse i386 assembly
   8 programs with intel syntax.
   9
  10 New pseudo-ops .func,.endfunc to aid in debugging user-written assembler code.
  11
  12 Full 16-bit mode support for i386.
  13
  14 Greatly improved instruction operand checking for i386.  This change will
  15 produce errors or warnings on incorrect assembly code that previous versions of
  16 gas accepted.  If you get unexpected messages from code that worked with older
  17 versions of gas, please double check the code before reporting a bug.
  18
  19 Weak symbol support added for COFF targets.
  20
  21 Mitsubishi D30V support added.
  22
  23 Texas Instruments c80 (tms320c80) support added.
  24
  25 Changes in 2.9:
  26
  27 Texas Instruments c30 (tms320c30) support added.
  28
  29 The assembler now optimizes the exception frame information generated by egcs
  30 and gcc 2.8.  The new --traditional-format option disables this optimization.
  31
  32 Added --gstabs option to generate stabs debugging information.
  33
  34 The -a option takes a new suboption, m (e.g., -alm) to expand macros in a
  35 listing.
  36
  37 Added -MD option to print dependencies.
  38
  39 Changes in 2.8:
  40
  41 BeOS support added.
  42
  43 MIPS16 support added.
  44
  45 Motorola ColdFire 5200 support added (configure for m68k and use -m5200).
  46
  47 Alpha/VMS support added.
  48
  49 m68k options --base-size-default-16, --base-size-default-32,
  50 --disp-size-default-16, and --disp-size-default-32 added.
  51
  52 The alignment directives now take an optional third argument, which is the
  53 maximum number of bytes to skip.  If doing the alignment would require skipping
  54 more than the given number of bytes, the alignment is not done at all.
  55
  56 The ELF assembler has a new pseudo-op, .symver, used for symbol versioning.
  57
  58 The -a option takes a new suboption, c (e.g., -alc), to skip false conditionals
  59 in listings.
  60
  61 Added new pseudo-op, .equiv; it's like .equ, except that it is an error if the
  62 symbol is already defined.
  63
  64 Changes in 2.7:
  65
  66 The PowerPC assembler now allows the use of symbolic register names (r0, etc.)
  67 if -mregnames is used.  Symbolic names preceded by a '%' (%r0, etc.) can be
  68 used any time.  PowerPC 860 move to/from SPR instructions have been added.
  69
  70 Alpha Linux (ELF) support added.
  71
  72 PowerPC ELF support added.
  73
  74 m68k Linux (ELF) support added.
  75
  76 i960 Hx/Jx support added.
  77
  78 i386/PowerPC gnu-win32 support added.
  79
  80 SCO ELF support added.  For OpenServer 5 targets (i386-unknown-sco3.2v5) the
  81 default is to build COFF-only support.  To get a set of tools that generate ELF
  82 (they'll understand both COFF and ELF), you must configure with
  83 target=i386-unknown-sco3.2v5elf.
  84
  85 m88k-motorola-sysv3* support added.
  86
  87 Changes in 2.6:
  88
  89 Gas now directly supports macros, without requiring GASP.
  90
  91 Gas now has an MRI assembler compatibility mode.  Use -M or --mri to select MRI
  92 mode.  The pseudo-op ``.mri 1'' will switch into the MRI mode until the ``.mri
  93 0'' is seen; this can be convenient for inline assembler code.
  94
  95 Added --defsym SYM=VALUE option.
  96
  97 Added -mips4 support to MIPS assembler.
  98
  99 Added PIC support to Solaris and SPARC SunOS 4 assembler.
 100
 101 Changes in 2.4:
 102
 103 Converted this directory to use an autoconf-generated configure script.
 104
 105 ARM support, from Richard Earnshaw.
 106
 107 Updated VMS support, from Pat Rankin, including considerably improved debugging
 108 support.
 109
 110 Support for the control registers in the 68060.
 111
 112 Handles (ignores) a new directive ".this_GCC_requires_the_GNU_assembler", to
 113 provide for possible future gcc changes, for targets where gas provides some
 114 features not available in the native assembler.  If the native assembler is
 115 used, it should become obvious pretty quickly what the problem is.
 116
 117 Usage message is available with "--help".
 118
 119 The GNU Assembler Preprocessor (gasp) is included.  (Actually, it was in 2.3
 120 also, but didn't get into the NEWS file.)
 121
 122 Weak symbol support for a.out.
 123
 124 A bug in the listing code which could cause an infinite loop has been fixed.
 125 Bugs in listings when generating a COFF object file have also been fixed.
 126
 127 Initial i386-svr4 PIC implementation from Eric Youngdale, based on code by Paul
 128 Kranenburg.
 129
 130 Improved Alpha support.  Immediate constants can have a much larger range now.
 131 Support for the 21164 has been contributed by Digital.
 132
 133 Updated ns32k (pc532-mach, netbsd532) support from Ian Dall.
 134
 135 Changes in 2.3:
 136
 137 Mach i386 support, by David Mackenzie and Ken Raeburn.
 138
 139 RS/6000 and PowerPC support by Ian Taylor.
 140
 141 VMS command scripts (make-gas.com, config-gas.com) have been worked on a bit,
 142 based on mail received from various people.  The `-h#' option should work again
 143 too.
 144
 145 HP-PA work, by Jeff Law.  Note, for the PA, gas-2.3 has been designed to work
 146 with gdb-4.12 and gcc-2.6.  As gcc-2.6 has not been released yet, a special
 147 version of gcc-2.5.8 has been patched to work with gas-2.3.  You can retrieve
 148 this special version of gcc-2.5.8 via anonymous ftp from jaguar.cs.utah.edu
 149 in the "dist" directory.
 150
 151 Vax support in gas fixed for BSD, so it builds and seems to run a couple simple
 152 tests okay.  I haven't put it through extensive testing.  (GNU make is
 153 currently required for BSD 4.3 builds.)
 154
 155 Support for the DEC Alpha, running OSF/1 (ECOFF format).  The gas support is
 156 based on code donated by CMU, which used an a.out-based format.  I'm afraid the
 157 alpha-a.out support is pretty badly mangled, and much of it removed; making it
 158 work will require rewriting it as BFD support for the format anyways.
 159
 160 Irix 5 support.
 161
 162 The test suites have been fixed up a bit, so that they should work with a
 163 couple different versions of expect and dejagnu.
 164
 165 Symbols' values are now handled internally as expressions, permitting more
 166 flexibility in evaluating them in some cases.  Some details of relocation
 167 handling have also changed, and simple constant pool management has been added,
 168 to make the Alpha port easier.
 169
 170 New option "--statistics" for printing out program run times.  This is intended
 171 to be used with the gcc "-Q" option, which prints out times spent in various
 172 phases of compilation.  (You should be able to get all of them printed out with
 173 "gcc -Q -Wa,--statistics", I think.)
 174
 175 ----------------------------------------------------------------
 176
 177 Changes in 2.2:
 178
 179 RS/6000 AIX and MIPS SGI Irix 5 support has been added.
 180
 181 Configurations that are still in development (and therefore are convenient to
 182 have listed in configure.in) still get rejected without a minor change to
 183 gas/Makefile.in, so people not doing development work shouldn't get the
 184 impression that support for such configurations is actually believed to be
 185 reliable.
 186
 187 The program name (usually "as") is printed when a fatal error message is
 188 displayed.  This should prevent some confusion about the source of occasional
 189 messages about "internal errors".
 190
 191 ELF support is falling into place.  Support for the 386 should be working.
 192 Support for SPARC Solaris is in.  HPPA support from Utah is being integrated.
 193
 194 Symbol values are maintained as expressions instead of being immediately boiled
 195 down to add-symbol, sub-symbol, and constant.  This permits slightly more
 196 complex calculations involving symbols whose values are not alreadey known.
 197
 198 DBX-style debugging info ("stabs") is now supported for COFF formats.
 199 If any stabs directives are seen in the source, GAS will create two new
 200 sections: a ".stab" and a ".stabstr" section.  The format of the .stab
 201 section is nearly identical to the a.out symbol format, and .stabstr is
 202 its string table.  For this to be useful, you must have configured GCC
 203 to generate stabs (by defining DBX_DEBUGGING_INFO), and must have a GDB
 204 that can use the stab sections (4.11 or later).
 205
 206 LynxOS, on i386 and m68k platforms, is now supported.  SPARC LynxOS
 207 support is in progress.
 208
 209 ----------------------------------------------------------------
 210
 211 Changes in 2.1:
 212
 213 Several small fixes for i386-aix (PS/2) support from Minh Tran-Le have been
 214 incorporated, but not well tested yet.
 215
 216 Altered the opcode table split for m68k; it should require less VM to compile
 217 with gcc now.
 218
 219 Some minor adjustments to add (Convergent Technologies') Miniframe support,
 220 suggested by Ronald Cole.
 221
 222 HPPA support (running OSF only, not HPUX) has been contributed by Utah.  This
 223 includes improved ELF support, which I've started adapting for SPARC Solaris
 224 2.x.  Integration isn't completely, so it probably won't work.
 225
 226 HP9000/300 support, donated by HP, has been merged in.
 227
 228 Ian Taylor has finished the MIPS ECOFF (Ultrix, Irix) support.
 229
 230 Better error messages for unsupported configurations (e.g., hppa-hpux).
 231
 232 Test suite framework is starting to become reasonable.
 233
 234 ----------------------------------------------------------------
 235
 236 Changes in 2.0:
 237
 238 Mostly bug fixes.
 239
 240 Some more merging of BFD and ELF code, but ELF still doesn't work.
 241
 242 ----------------------------------------------------------------
 243
 244 Changes in 1.94:
 245
 246 BFD merge is partly done.  Adventurous souls may try giving configure the
 247 "--with-bfd-assembler" option.  Currently, ELF format requires it, a.out format
 248 accepts it; SPARC CPU accepts it.  It's the default only for OS "elf" or
 249 "solaris".  (ELF isn't really supported yet.  It needs work.  I've got some
 250 code from Utah for HP-PA ELF, and from DG for m88k ELF, but they're not fully
 251 merged yet.)
 252
 253 The 68K opcode table has been split in half.  It should now compile under gcc
 254 without consuming ridiculous amounts of memory.
 255
 256 A couple data structures have been reduced in size.  This should result in
 257 saving a little bit of space at runtime.
 258
 259 Support for MIPS, from OSF and Ralph Campbell, has been merged in.  The OSF
 260 code provided ROSE format support, which I haven't merged in yet.  (I can make
 261 it available, if anyone wants to try it out.)  Ralph's code, for BSD 4.4,
 262 supports a.out format.  We don't have ECOFF support in just yet; it's coming.
 263
 264 Support for the Hitachi H8/500 has been added.
 265
 266 VMS host and target support should be working now, thanks chiefly to Eric
 267 Youngdale.
 268
 269 ----------------------------------------------------------------
 270
 271 Changes in 1.93.01:
 272
 273 For m68k, support for more processors has been added: 68040, CPU32, 68851.
 274
 275 For i386, .align is now power-of-two; was number-of-bytes.
 276
 277 For m68k, "%" is now accepted before register names.  For COFF format, which
 278 doesn't use underscore prefixes for C labels, it is required, so variable "a0"
 279 can be distinguished from the register.
 280
 281 Last public release was 1.38.  Lots of configuration changes since then, lots
 282 of new CPUs and formats, lots of bugs fixed.
 283
 284 \f
 285 Local variables:
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