Thiemo Seufer wrote: > > >Without the binutils patch, all binaries compiled for MIPS/Linux > >will be IRIX flavored which was the whole problem. > > Please may You elaborate about this? AFAICS, the IRIX flavour > can't be a problem by itself. > Yes, it is. Take a look at the IRIX_COMPAT macro in 'bfd/elf32-mips.c' which checks to see what type (flavor) of binary you are using. Before the patch all elf32-mips targets used the IRIX way of determining a if a symbol was global or not (see function that determines this at around line 2301 in 'bfd/elf32-mips.c'). By using IRIX flavored symbols, LOCAL and GLOBAL symbols are not sorted correctly and we get the problems with symbols being out of order in Linux kernel modules. With the patch and using 'elfXX-tradXXmips' as the new output targets, we sort local and global symbols correctly. > Changing the MIPS/Linux ABI to circumvent a toolchain bug seems > to be a bit extremistic. Am I missing some important details? > Yes, you are missing a few things, but I attribute that to my poor communications in my first email. My point is that the IRIX_COMPAT and SGI_COMPAT macros are used to check what type of target we are using in order to sort local and global symbols properly and many other places in the BFD library to creat binaries for Linux or for IRIX. The way (that I think) this should be done is to use the target 'elfXX-tradXXmips' and make that the default target utilized for MIPS-Linux targets. This is the decision that I wanted everyone's input on. I hope I explained this better. If not, ask more questions and I will try again. Cheers. -Steve -- Steven J. Hill - Embedded SW Engineer Public Key: 'http://www.cotw.com/pubkey.txt' FPR1: E124 6E1C AF8E 7802 A815 FPR2: 7D72 829C 3386 4C4A E17D
