Subject: Re: Shared library support for ARM ELF
To: Ben Harris <bjh21@netbsd.org>
From: Richard Earnshaw <rearnsha@arm.com>
List: port-arm
Date: 07/20/2001 14:20:47
> On Thu, 19 Jul 2001, Matt Thomas wrote:
> 
> > >Getting the ABI right is more important than getting it in 1.6 but wrong.
> > >We will have to live with any mistakes for a LONG time.
> >
> > I'm willing to help on GCC is it would speed things up.
> > So the remaining tasks are ATPS32 (?) and VFP support?
> 
> Remaining for what?  VFP support is only necessary if we want to run on
> systems with VFP co-processors, which I believe aren't commercially
> available yet.  If by "ATPS32", you mean 32-bit APCS, we've got that
> already (-mapcs-32).
> 
> > What else is required?
> 
> MASK_RETURN_ADDR needs to be changed to generate code to check what mode
> the CPU is in at run-time and pick the correct mask appropriately.
> sys/arch/arm/include/profile.h demonstrates how to do this, but it needs
> to be converted to a form GCC can understand.

64-bit stack alignment is the biggie.

However, do you have an assignment filed with the FSF?  If not, then you 
really need to get one done before working on the compiler or other GNU 
tools or we may end up with changes that can never be fed back to the 
master sources.

R.