Subject: New binutils for kernel

From: Ralf Baechle <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 20 Aug 2002 16:29:59 +0200

On Tue, Aug 20, 2002 at 04:19:35PM +0200, Maciej W. Rozycki wrote:

> On Mon, 19 Aug 2002, Ralf Baechle wrote:
> 
> > >  Are you sure?  I believe the patch effectively forces everyone to use
> > > binutils 2.13 for mips64.  Is it really acceptable now? 
> > 
> > In the past week I ended up more and more kludging around binutils bugs.
> > We need something newer and distributions seem to be all at ~ 2.12 at least.
> 
>  While 2.12 may be OK from the file format point of view, there are
> serious bugs leading to bad code.  So bad the kernel doesn't work.  It's
> really 2.13 that is needed.  I have another less important fix that will
> hopefully go in to 2.13.1 and all gcc versions are broken without yet
> another fix (it bites in mm/mmap.c; not sure if fatally). 
> 
> > So I guess it's time to bite the bullet?
> 
>  Since I'm using 2.13 anyway, it's alike to me.  But it should be
> discussed at the list, IMO.

Yep.  It won't hurt most of us kernel hackers very much but in particular
the distribution people may want to comment.

So any comments?

  Ralf

---

From: Daniel Jacobowitz <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 20 Aug 2002 10:50:51 -0400

> the distribution people may want to comment.

Well, I think 2.13's a good idea, but it's very new.  I'd say that was
acceptable as long as you're looking at MIPS64 only, not at MIPS32. 

-- 
Daniel Jacobowitz
MontaVista Software                         Debian GNU/Linux Developer

---

From: Ralf Baechle <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 20 Aug 2002 16:58:35 +0200

> acceptable as long as you're looking at MIPS64 only, not at MIPS32. 

Such considerations have kept us back at antique levels of binutils.  And
juggling with several different versions for userland, and two kernel
flavours is evil ...

  Ralf

---

From: Daniel Jacobowitz <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 20 Aug 2002 11:02:05 -0400

> juggling with several different versions for userland, and two kernel

Please keep in mind that 2.13's been out for all of half a month now. 
Almost no one's using it yet for significant development... if you
decide to require it, we can cope, though.

---

From: "Maciej W. Rozycki" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 20 Aug 2002 17:08:20 +0200 (MET DST)

> juggling with several different versions for userland, and two kernel

 Any version since 2.11, possibly older, should work just fine for 32-bit
MIPS.  I don't think there are any significant interface changes between
2.11 and 2.13, so if 2.13 works then 2.11 will not bail out either.  Thus
there is no need to force 2.13 for 32-bit MIPS, but I think it is
acceptable to stop caring about versions older than 2.11 in the nearby
future.

-- 
+  Maciej W. Rozycki, Technical University of Gdansk, Poland   +
+--------------------------------------------------------------+
+        e-mail: [email-masked], PGP key available        +

---

From: Daniel Jacobowitz <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 20 Aug 2002 11:11:35 -0400

> acceptable to stop caring about versions older than 2.11 in the nearby

Sure.

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From: Ralf Baechle <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 20 Aug 2002 17:17:35 +0200

> > acceptable to stop caring about versions older than 2.11 in the nearby

Sounds like we'll then recommend 2.13 for the fearless and 64-bit developers
and 2.11 for everybody else.

  Ralf

---

From: Karsten Merker <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 20 Aug 2002 19:27:24 +0200

[requiring binutils 2.13]]

> the distribution people may want to comment.

Well, I guess that covers me :-).

Debian Woody, the current stable Debian release (AFAIK the only full-blown
distribution for Linux/mips that targets at "normal users" and not only at
developers) ships with binutils 2.12.90.0.1. As the Debian policy requires
that no new program versions are to be introduced for the stable release,
Debian will not be able to switch to binutils 2.13 there. Bugfixes for
packages in the release are accepted, but not new upstream versions; so to
get any fixes in, they would need to be backported to binutils 2.12.

For the unstable distribution (currently binutils 2.12.90.0.15), switching
to binutils 2.13 should IMHO be possible in a reasonable timeframe, if it
does not break other things. Caveat: as Debian requires all 11 released
architectures to be in sync, any new version would have to work properly on
_all_ supported platforms. The decision about introducing a new version of a
package into Debian is taken by the package maintainer, so I am going to ask
him about his plans.

Regards,
Karsten
-- 
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Nach Paragraph 28 Abs. 3 Bundesdatenschutzgesetz widerspreche ich der Nutzung
oder Uebermittlung meiner Daten fuer Werbezwecke oder fuer die Markt- oder
Meinungsforschung.

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From: "H. J. Lu" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 20 Aug 2002 08:10:58 -0700

> juggling with several different versions for userland, and two kernel

I have no problems with binutils 2.13.90.0.4 on Linux/mips. I rebuild
everything, from kernel to rpms, for Linux/mipsel with it. They seem
to run fine.

H.J.