MIPS CPU names as provided to/by gas

[cgd at sibyte dot com (Chris G. Demetriou)]

So, as some of you who follow the MIPS community might have recently
noticed, MIPS has recently released information about a family of of
processors, the MIPS32 4K family.

The current variants are the 4Kp, 4Kc, and 4Km.

The recent changes to add 4K support to binutils added recognition of
those names, so that (depending on circumstance) they map to either
CPU_4K or CPU_MIPS32.  The function to provide a name for the string
CPU_4K, however, provides "4K".

4K is, of course, used as shorthand currently for "4000" and produces
CPU_R4000.

Given that 4K has been an acceptable alias for R4000 for a Long Time,
I'm wondering what the right solution to this is.


One reasonable thing might be to have CPU_4K translate back to "4Kc".

Another, probably more reasonable based on the MIPS naming convention,
is to actually name the MIPS32 4K parts as "MIPS32_4K" and
"MIPS32_4Kx"


Comments would be appreciated.  I am, of course, willing to code any
reasonable solution that's suggested.

Note that this is not going to be a one-time problem: MIPS already has
a MIPS32 5K on its roadmap, and, of course, 5K conflicts with the
existing accepted names for R5000.  8-S



chris

p.s. The existing addition of MIPS32 support is... somewhat
incomplete.  It treats MIPS32 as a CPU variant, and that is simply not
correct.  It is an ISA, just like MIPS-I - MIPS-V, and as such will
reasonable be extended by vendors just like they are.  However, even
assuming that that were reasonable as a temporary measure, MIPS32 is
actually "MIPS-II plus stuff," not "MIPS-I plus stuff" as seems to
currently be coded.  I.e. when you say -mips32, you really really do
mean MIPS32 ISA, or, failing that, you mean MIPS-II plus a few
instructions.  I'll be providing some patches before too long to make
it a real ISA.