.align behavior in gas

[Mike Meissner <meissner@cygnus.com>]

| In recent gas snapshots, it seems that for some i386 targets
| (e.g. i386-mach, i386-gnu), gas interprets the .align directive
| as a number of bytes; whereas for other targets (e.g. i386-linux)
| it is interpreted as log2(nbytes).  Has this always been the case?

Yes.  At least it was the case for i386-mach 6 years ago when we used
that version of gas for the i486 on OSF/1.  Elf assemblers
interpretted as log2 bytes.  I believe that in either case, gas is
attempting to be compatible with the native assembler.

| Are there any other directives that perform the same function but
| have a consistent behavior?  (I looked at gas/read.c, but couldn't
| find anything.)  If not, it would be very useful to have a new directive
| called, say, '.balign' that always takes a number of bytes, and/or a new
| directive called something like '.p2align' that always takes a power of
| two.  (I don't care what it is, as long as it's consistent!)   This
| should be trivial to do; just a matter of adding a new line or two
| to read.c, right?

Yep.

-- 
Michael Meissner, Cygnus Support (East Coast)
Suite 105, 48 Grove Street, Somerville, MA 02144, USA
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