Just now I was attempting to bring up gas on my Sparc to cross-assemble
for my Sun 3, and I discovered a little problem with the magic numbers.

It seems that we have different magic numbers for a.out files for
m68k architectures wth 4K and 8K page sizes. This is a problem when
compiling gas because unlike all of the other target include files,
tc-m68k.h doesn't just define AOUT_MACHTYPE as a number, but defines
it as MID_MACHINE, which is in turn taken from <machine/param.h>.
This works fine for an assembler generated on the target machine,
but not so well on my Sparc, which now would be using MID_SPARC,
the Sparc a.out magic number, if it could find it.

So my first question here is, how different are m68k machines with
4K and 8K page sizes? Are they really not binary compatable? Why
not? Or, if they are, why do we have separate magic numbers?

If they aren't, perhaps we need to make real separate architectures
for these two types of machines, rather than lumping them all under
`m68k'. Or can someone think of a better way around this problem?

cjs

Curt Sampson    curt@portal.ca		Info at http://www.portal.ca/
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