"Kevin D. Kissell" wrote: > > I saw that the algorithmics toolchain (which Dominic Sweetman > > offered to the Linux/MIPS community here a month ago) claims > > to have full support for the mips16 instruction set. > > > > My questions: > > Does anyone here have experiences with mips16 and/or with the > > algorithmics toolchain? > > Yes. Both Algorithmics and Green Hills embedded > tool chains support it reasonably well. GHS has no > Linux target, though. Algorithmics has been working > on one, but I'm not sure what it's current status is. > > > Is there working support for mips16 in any other gcc-version? > > Cygnus (now part of Red Hat) did the very first MIPS16 > support for gcc, most of which found its way into the > main development/maintence stream. But apparently > not enough of it, based on your experience. > > > How about gcc-3.x from CVS? > > No data there. > > > Any other comments or recommendations regarding mips16? > > MIPS16 requires more than just gcc support. > One needs a binutils that can distinguish a MIPS16 > binary module (or function if you want to be fancy and > mix/match within modules) from a MIPS32/64 module > and perform fixups so that the right selections are made > between JAL and JALX on function invocations. > If you've got that, you should not need a seperate > MIPS16 libc. > > To correctly support MIPS16, the Linux kernel does > need to be tweaked in those cases where user-mode > instructions are decoded and interpreted, as in > arch/mips/kernel/branch.c and unaligned.c. > I believe that code has been prototyped somewhere, > but it's not yet in any commonly used repository to > the best of my knowledge. If you avoid throwing > executing non-instructions, performing unaligned > accesses, etc, you should be able to tiptoe around > that deficiency. I don't think you need to tiptoe to get it working :-; It should be easy to avoid non-instructions, unaligned accesses and co. We have a few MIPS16 applications running using Algorithmics compiler and a static non-PIC libc. > > Regards, > > Kevin K. -- _ _ ____ ___ Carsten Langgaard Mailto:carstenl@mips.com |\ /|||___)(___ MIPS Denmark Direct: +45 4486 5527 | \/ ||| ____) Lautrupvang 4B Switch: +45 4486 5555 TECHNOLOGIES 2750 Ballerup Fax...: +45 4486 5556 Denmark http://www.mips.com
