2 Support for the Fujitsu FRV architecture added by Red Hat. Models for FR400 and
5 Support for DLX processor added.
7 GASP has now been deprecated and will be removed in a future release. Use the
8 macro facilities in GAS instead.
10 GASP now correctly parses floating point numbers. Unless the base is explicitly
11 specified, they are interpreted as decimal numbers regardless of the currently
16 Support for Don Knuth's MMIX, by Hans-Peter Nilsson.
18 Support for the OpenRISC 32-bit embedded processor by OpenCores.
20 The ARM assembler now accepts -march=..., -mcpu=... and -mfpu=... for
21 specifying the target instruction set. The old method of specifying the
22 target processor has been deprecated, but is still accepted for
25 Support for the VFP floating-point instruction set has been added to
28 New psuedo op: .incbin to include a set of binary data at a given point
29 in the assembly. Contributed by Anders Norlander.
31 The MIPS assembler now accepts -march/-mtune. -mcpu has been deprecated
32 but still works for compatability.
34 The MIPS assembler no longer issues a warning by default when it
35 generates a nop instruction from a macro. The new command line option
36 -n will turn on the warning.
40 x86 gas now supports the full Pentium4 instruction set.
42 Support for AMD x86-64 architecture, by Jan Hubicka, SuSE Labs.
44 Support for Motorola 68HC11 and 68HC12.
46 Support for Texas Instruments TMS320C54x (tic54x).
50 Support for i860, by Jason Eckhardt.
52 Support for CRIS (Axis Communications ETRAX series).
54 x86 gas has a new .arch pseudo op to specify the target CPU architecture.
56 x86 gas -q command line option quietens warnings about register size changes
57 due to suffix, indirect jmp/call without `*', stand-alone prefixes, and
58 translating various deprecated floating point instructions.
62 Support for the ARM msr instruction was changed to only allow an immediate
63 operand when altering the flags field.
65 Support for ATMEL AVR.
67 Support for IBM 370 ELF. Somewhat experimental.
69 Support for numbers with suffixes.
71 Added support for breaking to the end of repeat loops.
73 Added support for parallel instruction syntax (DOUBLEBAR_PARALLEL).
75 New .elseif pseudo-op added.
77 New --fatal-warnings option.
79 picoJava architecture support added.
81 Motorola MCore 210 processor support added.
83 A new pseudo-op .intel_syntax has been implemented to allow gas to parse i386
84 assembly programs with intel syntax.
86 New pseudo-ops .func,.endfunc to aid in debugging user-written assembler code.
88 Added -gdwarf2 option to generate DWARF 2 debugging information.
90 Full 16-bit mode support for i386.
92 Greatly improved instruction operand checking for i386. This change will
93 produce errors or warnings on incorrect assembly code that previous versions of
94 gas accepted. If you get unexpected messages from code that worked with older
95 versions of gas, please double check the code before reporting a bug.
97 Weak symbol support added for COFF targets.
99 Mitsubishi D30V support added.
101 Texas Instruments c80 (tms320c80) support added.
103 i960 ELF support added.
105 ARM ELF support added.
109 Texas Instruments c30 (tms320c30) support added.
111 The assembler now optimizes the exception frame information generated by egcs
112 and gcc 2.8. The new --traditional-format option disables this optimization.
114 Added --gstabs option to generate stabs debugging information.
116 The -a option takes a new suboption, m (e.g., -alm) to expand macros in a
119 Added -MD option to print dependencies.
125 MIPS16 support added.
127 Motorola ColdFire 5200 support added (configure for m68k and use -m5200).
129 Alpha/VMS support added.
131 m68k options --base-size-default-16, --base-size-default-32,
132 --disp-size-default-16, and --disp-size-default-32 added.
134 The alignment directives now take an optional third argument, which is the
135 maximum number of bytes to skip. If doing the alignment would require skipping
136 more than the given number of bytes, the alignment is not done at all.
138 The ELF assembler has a new pseudo-op, .symver, used for symbol versioning.
140 The -a option takes a new suboption, c (e.g., -alc), to skip false conditionals
143 Added new pseudo-op, .equiv; it's like .equ, except that it is an error if the
144 symbol is already defined.
148 The PowerPC assembler now allows the use of symbolic register names (r0, etc.)
149 if -mregnames is used. Symbolic names preceded by a '%' (%r0, etc.) can be
150 used any time. PowerPC 860 move to/from SPR instructions have been added.
152 Alpha Linux (ELF) support added.
154 PowerPC ELF support added.
156 m68k Linux (ELF) support added.
158 i960 Hx/Jx support added.
160 i386/PowerPC gnu-win32 support added.
162 SCO ELF support added. For OpenServer 5 targets (i386-unknown-sco3.2v5) the
163 default is to build COFF-only support. To get a set of tools that generate ELF
164 (they'll understand both COFF and ELF), you must configure with
165 target=i386-unknown-sco3.2v5elf.
167 m88k-motorola-sysv3* support added.
171 Gas now directly supports macros, without requiring GASP.
173 Gas now has an MRI assembler compatibility mode. Use -M or --mri to select MRI
174 mode. The pseudo-op ``.mri 1'' will switch into the MRI mode until the ``.mri
175 0'' is seen; this can be convenient for inline assembler code.
177 Added --defsym SYM=VALUE option.
179 Added -mips4 support to MIPS assembler.
181 Added PIC support to Solaris and SPARC SunOS 4 assembler.
185 Converted this directory to use an autoconf-generated configure script.
187 ARM support, from Richard Earnshaw.
189 Updated VMS support, from Pat Rankin, including considerably improved debugging
192 Support for the control registers in the 68060.
194 Handles (ignores) a new directive ".this_GCC_requires_the_GNU_assembler", to
195 provide for possible future gcc changes, for targets where gas provides some
196 features not available in the native assembler. If the native assembler is
197 used, it should become obvious pretty quickly what the problem is.
199 Usage message is available with "--help".
201 The GNU Assembler Preprocessor (gasp) is included. (Actually, it was in 2.3
202 also, but didn't get into the NEWS file.)
204 Weak symbol support for a.out.
206 A bug in the listing code which could cause an infinite loop has been fixed.
207 Bugs in listings when generating a COFF object file have also been fixed.
209 Initial i386-svr4 PIC implementation from Eric Youngdale, based on code by Paul
212 Improved Alpha support. Immediate constants can have a much larger range now.
213 Support for the 21164 has been contributed by Digital.
215 Updated ns32k (pc532-mach, netbsd532) support from Ian Dall.
219 Mach i386 support, by David Mackenzie and Ken Raeburn.
221 RS/6000 and PowerPC support by Ian Taylor.
223 VMS command scripts (make-gas.com, config-gas.com) have been worked on a bit,
224 based on mail received from various people. The `-h#' option should work again
227 HP-PA work, by Jeff Law. Note, for the PA, gas-2.3 has been designed to work
228 with gdb-4.12 and gcc-2.6. As gcc-2.6 has not been released yet, a special
229 version of gcc-2.5.8 has been patched to work with gas-2.3. You can retrieve
230 this special version of gcc-2.5.8 via anonymous ftp from jaguar.cs.utah.edu
231 in the "dist" directory.
233 Vax support in gas fixed for BSD, so it builds and seems to run a couple simple
234 tests okay. I haven't put it through extensive testing. (GNU make is
235 currently required for BSD 4.3 builds.)
237 Support for the DEC Alpha, running OSF/1 (ECOFF format). The gas support is
238 based on code donated by CMU, which used an a.out-based format. I'm afraid the
239 alpha-a.out support is pretty badly mangled, and much of it removed; making it
240 work will require rewriting it as BFD support for the format anyways.
244 The test suites have been fixed up a bit, so that they should work with a
245 couple different versions of expect and dejagnu.
247 Symbols' values are now handled internally as expressions, permitting more
248 flexibility in evaluating them in some cases. Some details of relocation
249 handling have also changed, and simple constant pool management has been added,
250 to make the Alpha port easier.
252 New option "--statistics" for printing out program run times. This is intended
253 to be used with the gcc "-Q" option, which prints out times spent in various
254 phases of compilation. (You should be able to get all of them printed out with
255 "gcc -Q -Wa,--statistics", I think.)
257 ----------------------------------------------------------------
261 RS/6000 AIX and MIPS SGI Irix 5 support has been added.
263 Configurations that are still in development (and therefore are convenient to
264 have listed in configure.in) still get rejected without a minor change to
265 gas/Makefile.in, so people not doing development work shouldn't get the
266 impression that support for such configurations is actually believed to be
269 The program name (usually "as") is printed when a fatal error message is
270 displayed. This should prevent some confusion about the source of occasional
271 messages about "internal errors".
273 ELF support is falling into place. Support for the 386 should be working.
274 Support for SPARC Solaris is in. HPPA support from Utah is being integrated.
276 Symbol values are maintained as expressions instead of being immediately boiled
277 down to add-symbol, sub-symbol, and constant. This permits slightly more
278 complex calculations involving symbols whose values are not alreadey known.
280 DBX-style debugging info ("stabs") is now supported for COFF formats.
281 If any stabs directives are seen in the source, GAS will create two new
282 sections: a ".stab" and a ".stabstr" section. The format of the .stab
283 section is nearly identical to the a.out symbol format, and .stabstr is
284 its string table. For this to be useful, you must have configured GCC
285 to generate stabs (by defining DBX_DEBUGGING_INFO), and must have a GDB
286 that can use the stab sections (4.11 or later).
288 LynxOS, on i386 and m68k platforms, is now supported. SPARC LynxOS
289 support is in progress.
291 ----------------------------------------------------------------
295 Several small fixes for i386-aix (PS/2) support from Minh Tran-Le have been
296 incorporated, but not well tested yet.
298 Altered the opcode table split for m68k; it should require less VM to compile
301 Some minor adjustments to add (Convergent Technologies') Miniframe support,
302 suggested by Ronald Cole.
304 HPPA support (running OSF only, not HPUX) has been contributed by Utah. This
305 includes improved ELF support, which I've started adapting for SPARC Solaris
306 2.x. Integration isn't completely, so it probably won't work.
308 HP9000/300 support, donated by HP, has been merged in.
310 Ian Taylor has finished the MIPS ECOFF (Ultrix, Irix) support.
312 Better error messages for unsupported configurations (e.g., hppa-hpux).
314 Test suite framework is starting to become reasonable.
316 ----------------------------------------------------------------
322 Some more merging of BFD and ELF code, but ELF still doesn't work.
324 ----------------------------------------------------------------
328 BFD merge is partly done. Adventurous souls may try giving configure the
329 "--with-bfd-assembler" option. Currently, ELF format requires it, a.out format
330 accepts it; SPARC CPU accepts it. It's the default only for OS "elf" or
331 "solaris". (ELF isn't really supported yet. It needs work. I've got some
332 code from Utah for HP-PA ELF, and from DG for m88k ELF, but they're not fully
335 The 68K opcode table has been split in half. It should now compile under gcc
336 without consuming ridiculous amounts of memory.
338 A couple data structures have been reduced in size. This should result in
339 saving a little bit of space at runtime.
341 Support for MIPS, from OSF and Ralph Campbell, has been merged in. The OSF
342 code provided ROSE format support, which I haven't merged in yet. (I can make
343 it available, if anyone wants to try it out.) Ralph's code, for BSD 4.4,
344 supports a.out format. We don't have ECOFF support in just yet; it's coming.
346 Support for the Hitachi H8/500 has been added.
348 VMS host and target support should be working now, thanks chiefly to Eric
351 ----------------------------------------------------------------
355 For m68k, support for more processors has been added: 68040, CPU32, 68851.
357 For i386, .align is now power-of-two; was number-of-bytes.
359 For m68k, "%" is now accepted before register names. For COFF format, which
360 doesn't use underscore prefixes for C labels, it is required, so variable "a0"
361 can be distinguished from the register.
363 Last public release was 1.38. Lots of configuration changes since then, lots
364 of new CPUs and formats, lots of bugs fixed.