[aarch64-port-dev ] Binutils version for Fedora 20

[Andrew Dinn]

Hi Juan,

Thanks for posting your report.

On 06/03/14 17:35, Andrew Haley wrote:
> On 03/06/2014 03:48 PM, Juan Jose Fumero wrote:
>> Following the instructions in the repository there is a binutils version 
>> according to the aarch64 code.  But in fedora 20 it doesn't work
> 
> Hi.  Good to have you around.
> 
> I don't really understand what problem you have: I'm also using F20, and
> it works for me.

The problem Juan had occurred on Fedora 20/x86. Andrew, are you
referring to running F20 on x86 or on AArch64?

The problem occurred when Juan tried to build the hsdis library for the
x86 simulator build using our modified binutils tree (downloaded from
sourceforge). Our code is based on binutils-2.23.1 and I have only ever
built it using gcc 4.7. It appears to be incompatible with gcc 4.8, the
version used on F20/x86, on two counts.

The first problem was in the binutils configure step which reported
several missing packages:

texinfo, flex, flex-devel, bison and bison-devel

After installing these packages the config step completed but the build
failed to compile.

We identified binutils-2.23.1 as the root of the problem for two reasons:

  another SICSA OpenJDK School participant had problems building the
sourceforge binutils tree on the most recent Ubuntu which also uses a
gcc 4.8 release

  building hsdis with binutils-2.23.tar.gz tree downloaded from gnu.org
fixed the compile issue with gcc 4.8

Of course the gnu.org binutils is not satisfactory as it does not
include our mods to i) use our VM-specific register names (e.g. esp for
r20) and more importantly ii) recognise our extra pseudo-instructions,
notifyentry, notifyexit, notifybc and brrt (brx86). So, disassemblies
sing the resulting hsdis include some rather confusing 'invalid
instruction' lines.

I am actually not sure why this change removed the compil eproblem. The
latest binutils version is 2.24. The version Juan got to work is an
/earlier/ version than our modified sourceforge tree.

I could reapply our modifications to binutils 2.24 and check that we can
build with gcc 3.7. If so then that should help anyone who is using gcc 4.8.

Juan, could you try rebuilding hsdis with binutils-2.24? We need to be
sure that it works with gcc 4.8 before we decide to move to using it.

regards,


Andrew Dinn
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