From owner-freebsd-mips@FreeBSD.ORG Thu Jun 10 23:24:57 2004 Return-Path: Delivered-To: freebsd-mips@freebsd.org Received: by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix, from userid 931) id E774D16A4D0; Thu, 10 Jun 2004 23:24:57 +0000 (GMT) Date: Thu, 10 Jun 2004 13:24:57 -1000 From: juli mallett To: Ralf Baechle Message-ID: <20040610232457.GA31150@FreeBSD.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> <20040610231904.GB16814@linux-mips.org> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline In-Reply-To: <20040610231904.GB16814@linux-mips.org> User-Agent: Mutt/1.4.1i X-Negacore: Yes X-Authentication-Warning: localhost: juli pwned teh intarweb X-Disclaimer: Opinions expressed about the deliciousness of eating brains are my own unless expressed by my employer. 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 23:24:58 -0000 * Ralf Baechle [ Date: 2004-06-10 ] [ w.r.t. Re: Some MIPS status goodies. ] > 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. non-trad elf has a lot of problems. But just having trad stuff, while fine for config.bfd, seems to cause havoc with the BU build environment FreeBSD uses and I can't figure out what's up. I get some of BU's lovely obscure messages there which make me think something is very borked. The non-trad stuff, in 64 bit mode, also wants stuff like rld_map which I am fundamentally opposed to adding. > > > 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. Works well enough as long as you have CKSEG around :( (or a sufficiently complex bootloader and simple enough system that you can cheat and run it out of user address space.) -- juli mallett. jmallett@freebsd.org. adrift in the pacific.