gas/NEWS

   1 -*- text -*-
   2
   3 * Macro names and macro parameter names can now be any identifier that would
   4   also be legal as a symbol elsewhere. For macro parameter names, this is
   5   known to cause problems in certain sources when the respective target uses
   6   characters inconsistently, and thus macro parameter references may no longer
   7   be recognized as such (see the documentation for details).
   8
   9 * Support the .f_floating, .d_floating, .g_floating and .h_floating directives
  10   for the VAX target in order to be more compatible with the VAX MACRO
  11   assembler.
  12
  13 * New command line option -mtune=[itanium1|itanium2] for IA64 targets.
  14
  15 Changes in 2.16:
  16
  17 * Redefinition of macros now results in an error.
  18
  19 * New command line option -mhint.b=[ok|warning|error] for IA64 targets.
  20
  21 * New command line option -munwind-check=[warning|error] for IA64
  22   targets.
  23
  24 * The IA64 port now uses automatic dependency violation removal as its default
  25   mode.
  26
  27 * Port to MAXQ processor contributed by HCL Tech.
  28
  29 * Added support for generating unwind tables for ARM ELF targets.
  30
  31 * Add a -g command line option to generate debug information in the target's
  32   preferred debug format.
  33
  34 * Support for the crx-elf target added.
  35
  36 * Support for the sh-symbianelf target added.
  37
  38 * Added a pseudo-op (.secrel32) to generate 32 bit section relative relocations
  39   on pe[i]-i386; required for this target's DWARF 2 support.
  40
  41 * Support for Motorola MCF521x/5249/547x/548x added.
  42
  43 * Support for ColdFire EMAC instructions added and Motorola syntax for MAC/EMAC
  44   instrucitons.
  45
  46 * New command line option -mno-shared for MIPS ELF targets.
  47
  48 * New command line option --alternate and pseudo-ops .altmacro and .noaltmacro
  49   added to enter (and leave) alternate macro syntax mode.
  50
  51 Changes in 2.15:
  52
  53 * The MIPS -membedded-pic option (Embedded-PIC code generation) is
  54   deprecated and will be removed in a future release.
  55
  56 * Added PIC m32r Linux (ELF) and support to M32R assembler.
  57
  58 * Added support for ARM V6.
  59
  60 * Added support for sh4a and variants.
  61
  62 * Support for Renesas M32R2 added.
  63
  64 * Limited support for Mapping Symbols as specified in the ARM ELF
  65   specification has been added to the arm assembler.
  66
  67 * On ARM architectures, added a new gas directive ".unreq" that undoes
  68   definitions created by ".req".
  69
  70 * Support for Motorola ColdFire MCF528x added.
  71
  72 * Added --gstabs+ switch to enable the generation of STABS debug format
  73   information with GNU extensions.
  74
  75 * Added support for MIPS64 Release 2.
  76
  77 * Added support for v850e1.
  78
  79 * Added -n switch for x86 assembler.  By default, x86 GAS replaces
  80   multiple nop instructions used for alignment within code sections
  81   with multi-byte nop instructions such as leal 0(%esi,1),%esi.  This
  82   switch disables the optimization.
  83
  84 * Removed -n option from MIPS assembler.  It was not useful, and confused the
  85   existing -non_shared option.
  86
  87 Changes in 2.14:
  88
  89 * Added support for MIPS32 Release 2.
  90
  91 * Added support for Xtensa architecture.
  92
  93 * Support for Intel's iWMMXt processor (an ARM variant) added.
  94
  95 * An assembler test generator has been contributed and an example file that
  96   uses it (gas/testsuite/gas/all/test-gen.c and test-exmaple.c).
  97
  98 * Support for SH2E added.
  99
 100 * GASP has now been removed.
 101
 102 * Support for Texas Instruments TMS320C4x and TMS320C3x series of
 103   DSP's contributed by Michael Hayes and Svein E. Seldal.
 104
 105 * Support for the Ubicom IP2xxx microcontroller added.
 106
 107 Changes in 2.13:
 108
 109 * Support for the Fujitsu FRV architecture added by Red Hat. Models for FR400
 110   and FR500 included.
 111
 112 * Support for DLX processor added.
 113
 114 * GASP has now been deprecated and will be removed in a future release.  Use
 115   the macro facilities in GAS instead.
 116
 117 * GASP now correctly parses floating point numbers. Unless the base is
 118   explicitly specified, they are interpreted as decimal numbers regardless of
 119   the currently specified base.
 120
 121 Changes in 2.12:
 122
 123 * Support for Don Knuth's MMIX, by Hans-Peter Nilsson.
 124
 125 * Support for the OpenRISC 32-bit embedded processor by OpenCores.
 126
 127 * The ARM assembler now accepts -march=..., -mcpu=... and -mfpu=... for
 128   specifying the target instruction set.  The old method of specifying the
 129   target processor has been deprecated, but is still accepted for
 130   compatibility.
 131
 132 * Support for the VFP floating-point instruction set has been added to
 133   the ARM assembler.
 134
 135 * New psuedo op: .incbin to include a set of binary data at a given point
 136   in the assembly.  Contributed by Anders Norlander.
 137
 138 * The MIPS assembler now accepts -march/-mtune. -mcpu has been deprecated
 139   but still works for compatability.
 140
 141 * The MIPS assembler no longer issues a warning by default when it
 142   generates a nop instruction from a macro. The new command line option
 143   -n will turn on the warning.
 144
 145 Changes in 2.11:
 146
 147 * Support for PDP-11 and 2.11BSD a.out format, by Lars Brinkhoff.
 148
 149 * x86 gas now supports the full Pentium4 instruction set.
 150
 151 * Support for AMD x86-64 architecture, by Jan Hubicka, SuSE Labs.
 152
 153 * Support for Motorola 68HC11 and 68HC12.
 154
 155 * Support for Texas Instruments TMS320C54x (tic54x).
 156
 157 * Support for IA-64.
 158
 159 * Support for i860, by Jason Eckhardt.
 160
 161 * Support for CRIS (Axis Communications ETRAX series).
 162
 163 * x86 gas has a new .arch pseudo op to specify the target CPU architecture.
 164
 165 * x86 gas -q command line option quietens warnings about register size changes
 166   due to suffix, indirect jmp/call without `*', stand-alone prefixes, and
 167   translating various deprecated floating point instructions.
 168
 169 Changes in 2.10:
 170
 171 * Support for the ARM msr instruction was changed to only allow an immediate
 172   operand when altering the flags field.
 173
 174 * Support for ATMEL AVR.
 175
 176 * Support for IBM 370 ELF.  Somewhat experimental.
 177
 178 * Support for numbers with suffixes.
 179
 180 * Added support for breaking to the end of repeat loops.
 181
 182 * Added support for parallel instruction syntax (DOUBLEBAR_PARALLEL).
 183
 184 * New .elseif pseudo-op added.
 185
 186 * New --fatal-warnings option.
 187
 188 * picoJava architecture support added.
 189
 190 * Motorola MCore 210 processor support added.
 191
 192 * A new pseudo-op .intel_syntax has been implemented to allow gas to parse i386
 193   assembly programs with intel syntax.
 194
 195 * New pseudo-ops .func,.endfunc to aid in debugging user-written assembler code.
 196
 197 * Added -gdwarf2 option to generate DWARF 2 debugging information.
 198
 199 * Full 16-bit mode support for i386.
 200
 201 * Greatly improved instruction operand checking for i386.  This change will
 202   produce errors or warnings on incorrect assembly code that previous versions
 203   of gas accepted.  If you get unexpected messages from code that worked with
 204   older versions of gas, please double check the code before reporting a bug.
 205
 206 * Weak symbol support added for COFF targets.
 207
 208 * Mitsubishi D30V support added.
 209
 210 * Texas Instruments c80 (tms320c80) support added.
 211
 212 * i960 ELF support added.
 213
 214 * ARM ELF support added.
 215
 216 Changes in 2.9:
 217
 218 * Texas Instruments c30 (tms320c30) support added.
 219
 220 * The assembler now optimizes the exception frame information generated by egcs
 221   and gcc 2.8.  The new --traditional-format option disables this optimization.
 222
 223 * Added --gstabs option to generate stabs debugging information.
 224
 225 * The -a option takes a new suboption, m (e.g., -alm) to expand macros in a
 226   listing.
 227
 228 * Added -MD option to print dependencies.
 229
 230 Changes in 2.8:
 231
 232 * BeOS support added.
 233
 234 * MIPS16 support added.
 235
 236 * Motorola ColdFire 5200 support added (configure for m68k and use -m5200).
 237
 238 * Alpha/VMS support added.
 239
 240 * m68k options --base-size-default-16, --base-size-default-32,
 241   --disp-size-default-16, and --disp-size-default-32 added.
 242
 243 * The alignment directives now take an optional third argument, which is the
 244   maximum number of bytes to skip.  If doing the alignment would require
 245   skipping more than the given number of bytes, the alignment is not done at
 246   all.
 247
 248 * The ELF assembler has a new pseudo-op, .symver, used for symbol versioning.
 249
 250 * The -a option takes a new suboption, c (e.g., -alc), to skip false
 251   conditionals in listings.
 252
 253 * Added new pseudo-op, .equiv; it's like .equ, except that it is an error if
 254   the symbol is already defined.
 255
 256 Changes in 2.7:
 257
 258 * The PowerPC assembler now allows the use of symbolic register names (r0,
 259   etc.) if -mregnames is used.  Symbolic names preceded by a '%' (%r0, etc.)
 260   can be used any time.  PowerPC 860 move to/from SPR instructions have been
 261   added.
 262
 263 * Alpha Linux (ELF) support added.
 264
 265 * PowerPC ELF support added.
 266
 267 * m68k Linux (ELF) support added.
 268
 269 * i960 Hx/Jx support added.
 270
 271 * i386/PowerPC gnu-win32 support added.
 272
 273 * SCO ELF support added.  For OpenServer 5 targets (i386-unknown-sco3.2v5) the
 274   default is to build COFF-only support.  To get a set of tools that generate
 275   ELF (they'll understand both COFF and ELF), you must configure with
 276   target=i386-unknown-sco3.2v5elf.
 277
 278 * m88k-motorola-sysv3* support added.
 279
 280 Changes in 2.6:
 281
 282 * Gas now directly supports macros, without requiring GASP.
 283
 284 * Gas now has an MRI assembler compatibility mode.  Use -M or --mri to select
 285   MRI mode.  The pseudo-op ``.mri 1'' will switch into the MRI mode until the
 286   ``.mri 0'' is seen; this can be convenient for inline assembler code.
 287
 288 * Added --defsym SYM=VALUE option.
 289
 290 * Added -mips4 support to MIPS assembler.
 291
 292 * Added PIC support to Solaris and SPARC SunOS 4 assembler.
 293
 294 Changes in 2.4:
 295
 296 * Converted this directory to use an autoconf-generated configure script.
 297
 298 * ARM support, from Richard Earnshaw.
 299
 300 * Updated VMS support, from Pat Rankin, including considerably improved
 301   debugging support.
 302
 303 * Support for the control registers in the 68060.
 304
 305 * Handles (ignores) a new directive ".this_GCC_requires_the_GNU_assembler", to
 306   provide for possible future gcc changes, for targets where gas provides some
 307   features not available in the native assembler.  If the native assembler is
 308   used, it should become obvious pretty quickly what the problem is.
 309
 310 * Usage message is available with "--help".
 311
 312 * The GNU Assembler Preprocessor (gasp) is included.  (Actually, it was in 2.3
 313   also, but didn't get into the NEWS file.)
 314
 315 * Weak symbol support for a.out.
 316
 317 * A bug in the listing code which could cause an infinite loop has been fixed.
 318   Bugs in listings when generating a COFF object file have also been fixed.
 319
 320 * Initial i386-svr4 PIC implementation from Eric Youngdale, based on code by
 321   Paul Kranenburg.
 322
 323 * Improved Alpha support.  Immediate constants can have a much larger range
 324   now. Support for the 21164 has been contributed by Digital.
 325
 326 * Updated ns32k (pc532-mach, netbsd532) support from Ian Dall.
 327
 328 Changes in 2.3:
 329
 330 * Mach i386 support, by David Mackenzie and Ken Raeburn.
 331
 332 * RS/6000 and PowerPC support by Ian Taylor.
 333
 334 * VMS command scripts (make-gas.com, config-gas.com) have been worked on a bit,
 335   based on mail received from various people.  The `-h#' option should work
 336   again too.
 337
 338 * HP-PA work, by Jeff Law.  Note, for the PA, gas-2.3 has been designed to work
 339   with gdb-4.12 and gcc-2.6.  As gcc-2.6 has not been released yet, a special
 340   version of gcc-2.5.8 has been patched to work with gas-2.3.  You can retrieve
 341   this special version of gcc-2.5.8 via anonymous ftp from jaguar.cs.utah.edu
 342   in the "dist" directory.
 343
 344 * Vax support in gas fixed for BSD, so it builds and seems to run a couple
 345   simple tests okay.  I haven't put it through extensive testing.  (GNU make is
 346   currently required for BSD 4.3 builds.)
 347
 348 * Support for the DEC Alpha, running OSF/1 (ECOFF format).  The gas support is
 349   based on code donated by CMU, which used an a.out-based format.  I'm afraid
 350   the alpha-a.out support is pretty badly mangled, and much of it removed;
 351   making it work will require rewriting it as BFD support for the format anyways.
 352
 353 * Irix 5 support.
 354
 355 * The test suites have been fixed up a bit, so that they should work with a
 356   couple different versions of expect and dejagnu.
 357
 358 * Symbols' values are now handled internally as expressions, permitting more
 359   flexibility in evaluating them in some cases.  Some details of relocation
 360   handling have also changed, and simple constant pool management has been
 361   added, to make the Alpha port easier.
 362
 363 * New option "--statistics" for printing out program run times.  This is
 364   intended to be used with the gcc "-Q" option, which prints out times spent in
 365   various phases of compilation.  (You should be able to get all of them
 366   printed out with "gcc -Q -Wa,--statistics", I think.)
 367
 368 Changes in 2.2:
 369
 370 * RS/6000 AIX and MIPS SGI Irix 5 support has been added.
 371
 372 * Configurations that are still in development (and therefore are convenient to
 373   have listed in configure.in) still get rejected without a minor change to
 374   gas/Makefile.in, so people not doing development work shouldn't get the
 375   impression that support for such configurations is actually believed to be
 376   reliable.
 377
 378 * The program name (usually "as") is printed when a fatal error message is
 379   displayed.  This should prevent some confusion about the source of occasional
 380   messages about "internal errors".
 381
 382 * ELF support is falling into place.  Support for the 386 should be working.
 383   Support for SPARC Solaris is in.  HPPA support from Utah is being integrated.
 384
 385 * Symbol values are maintained as expressions instead of being immediately
 386   boiled down to add-symbol, sub-symbol, and constant.  This permits slightly
 387   more complex calculations involving symbols whose values are not alreadey
 388   known.
 389
 390 * DBX-style debugging info ("stabs") is now supported for COFF formats.
 391   If any stabs directives are seen in the source, GAS will create two new
 392   sections: a ".stab" and a ".stabstr" section.  The format of the .stab
 393   section is nearly identical to the a.out symbol format, and .stabstr is
 394   its string table.  For this to be useful, you must have configured GCC
 395   to generate stabs (by defining DBX_DEBUGGING_INFO), and must have a GDB
 396   that can use the stab sections (4.11 or later).
 397
 398 * LynxOS, on i386 and m68k platforms, is now supported.  SPARC LynxOS
 399   support is in progress.
 400
 401 Changes in 2.1:
 402
 403 * Several small fixes for i386-aix (PS/2) support from Minh Tran-Le have been
 404   incorporated, but not well tested yet.
 405
 406 * Altered the opcode table split for m68k; it should require less VM to compile
 407   with gcc now.
 408
 409 * Some minor adjustments to add (Convergent Technologies') Miniframe support,
 410   suggested by Ronald Cole.
 411
 412 * HPPA support (running OSF only, not HPUX) has been contributed by Utah.  This
 413   includes improved ELF support, which I've started adapting for SPARC Solaris
 414   2.x.  Integration isn't completely, so it probably won't work.
 415
 416 * HP9000/300 support, donated by HP, has been merged in.
 417
 418 * Ian Taylor has finished the MIPS ECOFF (Ultrix, Irix) support.
 419
 420 * Better error messages for unsupported configurations (e.g., hppa-hpux).
 421
 422 * Test suite framework is starting to become reasonable.
 423
 424 Changes in 2.0:
 425
 426 * Mostly bug fixes.
 427
 428 * Some more merging of BFD and ELF code, but ELF still doesn't work.
 429
 430 Changes in 1.94:
 431
 432 * BFD merge is partly done.  Adventurous souls may try giving configure the
 433   "--with-bfd-assembler" option.  Currently, ELF format requires it, a.out
 434   format accepts it; SPARC CPU accepts it.  It's the default only for OS "elf"
 435   or "solaris".  (ELF isn't really supported yet.  It needs work.  I've got
 436   some code from Utah for HP-PA ELF, and from DG for m88k ELF, but they're not
 437   fully merged yet.)
 438
 439 * The 68K opcode table has been split in half.  It should now compile under gcc
 440   without consuming ridiculous amounts of memory.
 441
 442 * A couple data structures have been reduced in size.  This should result in
 443   saving a little bit of space at runtime.
 444
 445 * Support for MIPS, from OSF and Ralph Campbell, has been merged in.  The OSF
 446   code provided ROSE format support, which I haven't merged in yet.  (I can
 447   make it available, if anyone wants to try it out.)  Ralph's code, for BSD
 448   4.4, supports a.out format.  We don't have ECOFF support in just yet; it's
 449   coming.
 450
 451 * Support for the Hitachi H8/500 has been added.
 452
 453 * VMS host and target support should be working now, thanks chiefly to Eric
 454   Youngdale.
 455
 456 Changes in 1.93.01:
 457
 458 * For m68k, support for more processors has been added: 68040, CPU32, 68851.
 459
 460 * For i386, .align is now power-of-two; was number-of-bytes.
 461
 462 * For m68k, "%" is now accepted before register names.  For COFF format, which
 463   doesn't use underscore prefixes for C labels, it is required, so variable "a0"
 464   can be distinguished from the register.
 465
 466 * Last public release was 1.38.  Lots of configuration changes since then, lots
 467   of new CPUs and formats, lots of bugs fixed.
 468
 469 \f
 470 Local variables:
 471 fill-column: 79
 472 End: