IEEE 695 What targets are supported?

[John Darrington <john at darrington dot wattle dot id dot au>]

I heard that binutils was able to handle ieee-695 object files.  However I'm having trouble 
finding the correct configuration.

When I configure with (for example) --target=m68k-ieee  the build complains with 

 "This target is no longer supported in gas"  

It doesn't say if it is the m68k part or the ieee part which is no longer supported,
but common sense would imply the m68k bit since the latter has nothing to do with 
assembly.  However I also get a similar error if I choose --target=sparc-ieee :

 "GAS does not know what format to use for target sparc-unknown-ieee"

Why doesn't it know?  The format is ieee - I told it so. 


If I ignore the error  (using make -k) I do get the reset of binutils built.
However, the result doesn't seem to behave as I would expect.  For example, objdump
does not recognise such files:

./binutils/objdump -b ieee -x /home/john/ieee695/Examples/binary.abs 
./binutils/objdump: /home/john/ieee695/Examples/binary.abs: File format not recognized


So my questions are:

* Is there are list of supported targets?

* I understood that binutils used a canonical abstraction of objects (called BFD), so
  why is it that certain combinations of CPU and binary format seem not to be permitted?
  Even if there exists no hardware that can run such a combination, I don't see why 
  binutils should not be able to generate it.  It could always be run on a simulator.

* What cpu (if any) can be used with ieee binaries ?


Thanks for any enlightenment.

J'



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