Re: ARM BE8 linker support

[Daniel Jacobowitz <drow at false dot org>]

On Fri, Apr 02, 2004 at 11:03:08AM +0100, Richard Earnshaw wrote:
> > If this were gcc I'd probably suggest something equivalent to -mabi=, and the 
> > associated --with-abi= configure switch. There doesn't seem to be the same 
> > precedent for this in binutils/ld though.
> > 
> 
> I'm not entirely convinced by the --with-abi= in gcc.  It sort of makes
> sense in the deeply embedded world, but it's generally pretty
> meaningless in the platform space (a platform defines a fixed ABI, and
> you can't generally mess with the configuration and expect things to
> work).

Well, you can in surprisingly many cases.  That's where I use it and
designed it for - not in the "deeply embedded" space, but in custom
GNU/Linux target environments.  Obviously any libraries that are aware
of the ABI (meaning just glibc, for me at the moment) need some custom
work to make this happen.  But otherwise it works quite well, and it
prevents all sorts of embarassing mistakes later in the development
cycle (mysterious linker errors, mostly :).

For instance, it's remarkably easy to build an ARM soft-fpa or soft-vfp
userspace.  As it happens I had to hack the gas build process a bit
to change the FP default for the assembler, since no
--with-float/--with-abi was available.

-- 
Daniel Jacobowitz
MontaVista Software                         Debian GNU/Linux Developer