5 Support for the Fujitsu FRV architecture added by Red Hat. Models for FR400 and
8 Support for DLX processor added.
10 GASP has now been deprecated and will be removed in a future release. Use the
11 macro facilities in GAS instead.
13 GASP now correctly parses floating point numbers. Unless the base is explicitly
14 specified, they are interpreted as decimal numbers regardless of the currently
19 Support for Don Knuth's MMIX, by Hans-Peter Nilsson.
21 Support for the OpenRISC 32-bit embedded processor by OpenCores.
23 The ARM assembler now accepts -march=..., -mcpu=... and -mfpu=... for
24 specifying the target instruction set. The old method of specifying the
25 target processor has been deprecated, but is still accepted for
28 Support for the VFP floating-point instruction set has been added to
31 New psuedo op: .incbin to include a set of binary data at a given point
32 in the assembly. Contributed by Anders Norlander.
34 The MIPS assembler now accepts -march/-mtune. -mcpu has been deprecated
35 but still works for compatability.
37 The MIPS assembler no longer issues a warning by default when it
38 generates a nop instruction from a macro. The new command line option
39 -n will turn on the warning.
43 x86 gas now supports the full Pentium4 instruction set.
45 Support for AMD x86-64 architecture, by Jan Hubicka, SuSE Labs.
47 Support for Motorola 68HC11 and 68HC12.
49 Support for Texas Instruments TMS320C54x (tic54x).
53 Support for i860, by Jason Eckhardt.
55 Support for CRIS (Axis Communications ETRAX series).
57 x86 gas has a new .arch pseudo op to specify the target CPU architecture.
59 x86 gas -q command line option quietens warnings about register size changes
60 due to suffix, indirect jmp/call without `*', stand-alone prefixes, and
61 translating various deprecated floating point instructions.
65 Support for the ARM msr instruction was changed to only allow an immediate
66 operand when altering the flags field.
68 Support for ATMEL AVR.
70 Support for IBM 370 ELF. Somewhat experimental.
72 Support for numbers with suffixes.
74 Added support for breaking to the end of repeat loops.
76 Added support for parallel instruction syntax (DOUBLEBAR_PARALLEL).
78 New .elseif pseudo-op added.
80 New --fatal-warnings option.
82 picoJava architecture support added.
84 Motorola MCore 210 processor support added.
86 A new pseudo-op .intel_syntax has been implemented to allow gas to parse i386
87 assembly programs with intel syntax.
89 New pseudo-ops .func,.endfunc to aid in debugging user-written assembler code.
91 Added -gdwarf2 option to generate DWARF 2 debugging information.
93 Full 16-bit mode support for i386.
95 Greatly improved instruction operand checking for i386. This change will
96 produce errors or warnings on incorrect assembly code that previous versions of
97 gas accepted. If you get unexpected messages from code that worked with older
98 versions of gas, please double check the code before reporting a bug.
100 Weak symbol support added for COFF targets.
102 Mitsubishi D30V support added.
104 Texas Instruments c80 (tms320c80) support added.
106 i960 ELF support added.
108 ARM ELF support added.
112 Texas Instruments c30 (tms320c30) support added.
114 The assembler now optimizes the exception frame information generated by egcs
115 and gcc 2.8. The new --traditional-format option disables this optimization.
117 Added --gstabs option to generate stabs debugging information.
119 The -a option takes a new suboption, m (e.g., -alm) to expand macros in a
122 Added -MD option to print dependencies.
128 MIPS16 support added.
130 Motorola ColdFire 5200 support added (configure for m68k and use -m5200).
132 Alpha/VMS support added.
134 m68k options --base-size-default-16, --base-size-default-32,
135 --disp-size-default-16, and --disp-size-default-32 added.
137 The alignment directives now take an optional third argument, which is the
138 maximum number of bytes to skip. If doing the alignment would require skipping
139 more than the given number of bytes, the alignment is not done at all.
141 The ELF assembler has a new pseudo-op, .symver, used for symbol versioning.
143 The -a option takes a new suboption, c (e.g., -alc), to skip false conditionals
146 Added new pseudo-op, .equiv; it's like .equ, except that it is an error if the
147 symbol is already defined.
151 The PowerPC assembler now allows the use of symbolic register names (r0, etc.)
152 if -mregnames is used. Symbolic names preceded by a '%' (%r0, etc.) can be
153 used any time. PowerPC 860 move to/from SPR instructions have been added.
155 Alpha Linux (ELF) support added.
157 PowerPC ELF support added.
159 m68k Linux (ELF) support added.
161 i960 Hx/Jx support added.
163 i386/PowerPC gnu-win32 support added.
165 SCO ELF support added. For OpenServer 5 targets (i386-unknown-sco3.2v5) the
166 default is to build COFF-only support. To get a set of tools that generate ELF
167 (they'll understand both COFF and ELF), you must configure with
168 target=i386-unknown-sco3.2v5elf.
170 m88k-motorola-sysv3* support added.
174 Gas now directly supports macros, without requiring GASP.
176 Gas now has an MRI assembler compatibility mode. Use -M or --mri to select MRI
177 mode. The pseudo-op ``.mri 1'' will switch into the MRI mode until the ``.mri
178 0'' is seen; this can be convenient for inline assembler code.
180 Added --defsym SYM=VALUE option.
182 Added -mips4 support to MIPS assembler.
184 Added PIC support to Solaris and SPARC SunOS 4 assembler.
188 Converted this directory to use an autoconf-generated configure script.
190 ARM support, from Richard Earnshaw.
192 Updated VMS support, from Pat Rankin, including considerably improved debugging
195 Support for the control registers in the 68060.
197 Handles (ignores) a new directive ".this_GCC_requires_the_GNU_assembler", to
198 provide for possible future gcc changes, for targets where gas provides some
199 features not available in the native assembler. If the native assembler is
200 used, it should become obvious pretty quickly what the problem is.
202 Usage message is available with "--help".
204 The GNU Assembler Preprocessor (gasp) is included. (Actually, it was in 2.3
205 also, but didn't get into the NEWS file.)
207 Weak symbol support for a.out.
209 A bug in the listing code which could cause an infinite loop has been fixed.
210 Bugs in listings when generating a COFF object file have also been fixed.
212 Initial i386-svr4 PIC implementation from Eric Youngdale, based on code by Paul
215 Improved Alpha support. Immediate constants can have a much larger range now.
216 Support for the 21164 has been contributed by Digital.
218 Updated ns32k (pc532-mach, netbsd532) support from Ian Dall.
222 Mach i386 support, by David Mackenzie and Ken Raeburn.
224 RS/6000 and PowerPC support by Ian Taylor.
226 VMS command scripts (make-gas.com, config-gas.com) have been worked on a bit,
227 based on mail received from various people. The `-h#' option should work again
230 HP-PA work, by Jeff Law. Note, for the PA, gas-2.3 has been designed to work
231 with gdb-4.12 and gcc-2.6. As gcc-2.6 has not been released yet, a special
232 version of gcc-2.5.8 has been patched to work with gas-2.3. You can retrieve
233 this special version of gcc-2.5.8 via anonymous ftp from jaguar.cs.utah.edu
234 in the "dist" directory.
236 Vax support in gas fixed for BSD, so it builds and seems to run a couple simple
237 tests okay. I haven't put it through extensive testing. (GNU make is
238 currently required for BSD 4.3 builds.)
240 Support for the DEC Alpha, running OSF/1 (ECOFF format). The gas support is
241 based on code donated by CMU, which used an a.out-based format. I'm afraid the
242 alpha-a.out support is pretty badly mangled, and much of it removed; making it
243 work will require rewriting it as BFD support for the format anyways.
247 The test suites have been fixed up a bit, so that they should work with a
248 couple different versions of expect and dejagnu.
250 Symbols' values are now handled internally as expressions, permitting more
251 flexibility in evaluating them in some cases. Some details of relocation
252 handling have also changed, and simple constant pool management has been added,
253 to make the Alpha port easier.
255 New option "--statistics" for printing out program run times. This is intended
256 to be used with the gcc "-Q" option, which prints out times spent in various
257 phases of compilation. (You should be able to get all of them printed out with
258 "gcc -Q -Wa,--statistics", I think.)
260 ----------------------------------------------------------------
264 RS/6000 AIX and MIPS SGI Irix 5 support has been added.
266 Configurations that are still in development (and therefore are convenient to
267 have listed in configure.in) still get rejected without a minor change to
268 gas/Makefile.in, so people not doing development work shouldn't get the
269 impression that support for such configurations is actually believed to be
272 The program name (usually "as") is printed when a fatal error message is
273 displayed. This should prevent some confusion about the source of occasional
274 messages about "internal errors".
276 ELF support is falling into place. Support for the 386 should be working.
277 Support for SPARC Solaris is in. HPPA support from Utah is being integrated.
279 Symbol values are maintained as expressions instead of being immediately boiled
280 down to add-symbol, sub-symbol, and constant. This permits slightly more
281 complex calculations involving symbols whose values are not alreadey known.
283 DBX-style debugging info ("stabs") is now supported for COFF formats.
284 If any stabs directives are seen in the source, GAS will create two new
285 sections: a ".stab" and a ".stabstr" section. The format of the .stab
286 section is nearly identical to the a.out symbol format, and .stabstr is
287 its string table. For this to be useful, you must have configured GCC
288 to generate stabs (by defining DBX_DEBUGGING_INFO), and must have a GDB
289 that can use the stab sections (4.11 or later).
291 LynxOS, on i386 and m68k platforms, is now supported. SPARC LynxOS
292 support is in progress.
294 ----------------------------------------------------------------
298 Several small fixes for i386-aix (PS/2) support from Minh Tran-Le have been
299 incorporated, but not well tested yet.
301 Altered the opcode table split for m68k; it should require less VM to compile
304 Some minor adjustments to add (Convergent Technologies') Miniframe support,
305 suggested by Ronald Cole.
307 HPPA support (running OSF only, not HPUX) has been contributed by Utah. This
308 includes improved ELF support, which I've started adapting for SPARC Solaris
309 2.x. Integration isn't completely, so it probably won't work.
311 HP9000/300 support, donated by HP, has been merged in.
313 Ian Taylor has finished the MIPS ECOFF (Ultrix, Irix) support.
315 Better error messages for unsupported configurations (e.g., hppa-hpux).
317 Test suite framework is starting to become reasonable.
319 ----------------------------------------------------------------
325 Some more merging of BFD and ELF code, but ELF still doesn't work.
327 ----------------------------------------------------------------
331 BFD merge is partly done. Adventurous souls may try giving configure the
332 "--with-bfd-assembler" option. Currently, ELF format requires it, a.out format
333 accepts it; SPARC CPU accepts it. It's the default only for OS "elf" or
334 "solaris". (ELF isn't really supported yet. It needs work. I've got some
335 code from Utah for HP-PA ELF, and from DG for m88k ELF, but they're not fully
338 The 68K opcode table has been split in half. It should now compile under gcc
339 without consuming ridiculous amounts of memory.
341 A couple data structures have been reduced in size. This should result in
342 saving a little bit of space at runtime.
344 Support for MIPS, from OSF and Ralph Campbell, has been merged in. The OSF
345 code provided ROSE format support, which I haven't merged in yet. (I can make
346 it available, if anyone wants to try it out.) Ralph's code, for BSD 4.4,
347 supports a.out format. We don't have ECOFF support in just yet; it's coming.
349 Support for the Hitachi H8/500 has been added.
351 VMS host and target support should be working now, thanks chiefly to Eric
354 ----------------------------------------------------------------
358 For m68k, support for more processors has been added: 68040, CPU32, 68851.
360 For i386, .align is now power-of-two; was number-of-bytes.
362 For m68k, "%" is now accepted before register names. For COFF format, which
363 doesn't use underscore prefixes for C labels, it is required, so variable "a0"
364 can be distinguished from the register.
366 Last public release was 1.38. Lots of configuration changes since then, lots
367 of new CPUs and formats, lots of bugs fixed.