From owner-freebsd-mips@FreeBSD.ORG Thu Jun 10 23:19:07 2004 Return-Path: Delivered-To: freebsd-mips@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.FreeBSD.org (mx1.freebsd.org [216.136.204.125]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id C6C2B16A4CE; Thu, 10 Jun 2004 23:19:07 +0000 (GMT) Received: from mail.linux-mips.net (p508B6474.dip.t-dialin.net [80.139.100.116]) by mx1.FreeBSD.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id CF8F943D55; Thu, 10 Jun 2004 23:19:06 +0000 (GMT) (envelope-from ralf@linux-mips.org) Received: from fluff.linux-mips.net (fluff.linux-mips.net [127.0.0.1]) by mail.linux-mips.net (8.12.11/8.12.8) with ESMTP id i5ANJ4vM018075; Fri, 11 Jun 2004 01:19:04 +0200 Received: (from ralf@localhost) by fluff.linux-mips.net (8.12.11/8.12.11/Submit) id i5ANJ4l4018074; Fri, 11 Jun 2004 01:19:04 +0200 Date: Fri, 11 Jun 2004 01:19:04 +0200 From: Ralf Baechle To: juli mallett Message-ID: <20040610231904.GB16814@linux-mips.org> References: <20040610090712.GA71925@FreeBSD.org> <4038.217.68.50.10.1086861511.squirrel@webmail.dataloss.nl> <20040610101801.GA75709@FreeBSD.org> <20040610123718.GA32315@linux-mips.org> <20040610221746.GB26579@FreeBSD.org> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline In-Reply-To: <20040610221746.GB26579@FreeBSD.org> User-Agent: Mutt/1.4.1i cc: freebsd-mips@FreeBSD.org cc: "Steffen M. Boelaars" Subject: Re: Some MIPS status goodies. X-BeenThere: freebsd-mips@freebsd.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.1 Precedence: list List-Id: Porting FreeBSD to MIPS List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Thu, 10 Jun 2004 23:19:07 -0000 On Thu, Jun 10, 2004 at 12:17:46PM -1000, juli mallett wrote: > > 64-bit ELF requires very recent GNU tools and even in those it cannot > > be considered of prime quality. > > Right now I'm struggling with the more loathsome problem of > elf-{,trad}{big,little}mips ... Just where do you and don't > you need the "trad" -- this seems to be a painful thing, certainly > it has been for me, and I'm hoping that BU (namely BFD) will grow > some more friendly compilation conditionals in the future, but I'm > not going out of my way for that... Certainly I'm happy with my > working elf32-tradbigmips toolchain. >From my experience forget about the non-trad variant. trad*mips is ABI ELF (or rather ABI ELF with GNU breakage); the non-trad variants are IRIX ELF with it's undocumented differences compared to ABI ELF. The nasty stuff about IRIX ELF is that some of it's difference also affect generic ELF. We used to use non-trad ELF for Linux until we hit a problem with modutils which was explained by the difference between non-trad ELF and trad ELF, so we switched. I think this is the only time the difference between the two actually did matter to us. > > 64-bit code is so much larger that it often delivers just half the > > performance of 32-bit code. > > FreeBSD/MIPS is definably 64-bit code, just 32-bit ELF for now. Ah, that sounds like the hack which I'm using also. Initially born due to the complete unusability of NABI ELF this code model turned into the code model of choice because it's so much more efficient and smaller - the difference is in the range of hundreds of kB for an IP27 kernel. The problem is this may become impossible with later GNU tools but let's see what can be done about that. Ralf