Subject: Binutils 2.8.1.0.15

From: Ralf Baechle <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 15 Jul 1997 14:02:56 +0200 (MEST)

Hi all,

after having found a couple of bugs in binutils 2.7 during the last
time I decided it'd about time to go for 2.8 instead of putting more
time into 2.7.  Out of the frying pan into the fire ...

 - binutils 2.8.0.13 still need the special patches to gas/config/tc-mips.c
   to be applied.  Otherwise they will reject the %HI, %hi and %lo
   operators.
 - since some pre-2.8 version binutils do optimize the case of the -N.
   This helps to reduce the output filesize but somehow ld layouts
   the segments wrong which results in a unuseable kernel.  Removing
   -N from the LDFLAGS in arch/mips/Makefile is a workaround.
 - The %gp_rel() operator is not implemented in GAS.  This means that
   we cannot assemble PIC code with GAS that is produced by current
   snapshots.
 - GAS still doesn't deal with _huge_ loops.  The only program I know
   of which is affected is lmbench, but that alone is reason enough
   to fix it.

  Ralf