gas/NEWS

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