3 The MIPS assembler now accepts -march/-mtune. -mcpu has been deprecated
4 but still works for compatability.
6 The MIPS assembler no longer issues a warning by default when it
7 generates a nop instruction from a macro. The new command line option
8 -n will turn on the warning.
12 x86 gas now supports the full Pentium4 instruction set.
14 Support for AMD x86-64 architecture, by Jan Hubicka, SuSE Labs.
16 Support for Motorola 68HC11 and 68HC12.
18 Support for Texas Instruments TMS320C54x (tic54x).
22 Support for i860, by Jason Eckhardt.
24 Support for CRIS (Axis Communications ETRAX series).
26 x86 gas has a new .arch pseudo op to specify the target CPU architecture.
28 x86 gas -q command line option quietens warnings about register size changes
29 due to suffix, indirect jmp/call without `*', stand-alone prefixes, and
30 translating various deprecated floating point instructions.
34 Support for the ARM msr instruction was changed to only allow an immediate
35 operand when altering the flags field.
37 Support for ATMEL AVR.
39 Support for IBM 370 ELF. Somewhat experimental.
41 Support for numbers with suffixes.
43 Added support for breaking to the end of repeat loops.
45 Added support for parallel instruction syntax (DOUBLEBAR_PARALLEL).
47 New .elseif pseudo-op added.
49 New --fatal-warnings option.
51 picoJava architecture support added.
53 Motorola MCore 210 processor support added.
55 A new pseudo-op .intel_syntax has been implemented to allow gas to parse i386
56 assembly programs with intel syntax.
58 New pseudo-ops .func,.endfunc to aid in debugging user-written assembler code.
60 Added -gdwarf2 option to generate DWARF 2 debugging information.
62 Full 16-bit mode support for i386.
64 Greatly improved instruction operand checking for i386. This change will
65 produce errors or warnings on incorrect assembly code that previous versions of
66 gas accepted. If you get unexpected messages from code that worked with older
67 versions of gas, please double check the code before reporting a bug.
69 Weak symbol support added for COFF targets.
71 Mitsubishi D30V support added.
73 Texas Instruments c80 (tms320c80) support added.
75 i960 ELF support added.
77 ARM ELF support added.
81 Texas Instruments c30 (tms320c30) support added.
83 The assembler now optimizes the exception frame information generated by egcs
84 and gcc 2.8. The new --traditional-format option disables this optimization.
86 Added --gstabs option to generate stabs debugging information.
88 The -a option takes a new suboption, m (e.g., -alm) to expand macros in a
91 Added -MD option to print dependencies.
99 Motorola ColdFire 5200 support added (configure for m68k and use -m5200).
101 Alpha/VMS support added.
103 m68k options --base-size-default-16, --base-size-default-32,
104 --disp-size-default-16, and --disp-size-default-32 added.
106 The alignment directives now take an optional third argument, which is the
107 maximum number of bytes to skip. If doing the alignment would require skipping
108 more than the given number of bytes, the alignment is not done at all.
110 The ELF assembler has a new pseudo-op, .symver, used for symbol versioning.
112 The -a option takes a new suboption, c (e.g., -alc), to skip false conditionals
115 Added new pseudo-op, .equiv; it's like .equ, except that it is an error if the
116 symbol is already defined.
120 The PowerPC assembler now allows the use of symbolic register names (r0, etc.)
121 if -mregnames is used. Symbolic names preceded by a '%' (%r0, etc.) can be
122 used any time. PowerPC 860 move to/from SPR instructions have been added.
124 Alpha Linux (ELF) support added.
126 PowerPC ELF support added.
128 m68k Linux (ELF) support added.
130 i960 Hx/Jx support added.
132 i386/PowerPC gnu-win32 support added.
134 SCO ELF support added. For OpenServer 5 targets (i386-unknown-sco3.2v5) the
135 default is to build COFF-only support. To get a set of tools that generate ELF
136 (they'll understand both COFF and ELF), you must configure with
137 target=i386-unknown-sco3.2v5elf.
139 m88k-motorola-sysv3* support added.
143 Gas now directly supports macros, without requiring GASP.
145 Gas now has an MRI assembler compatibility mode. Use -M or --mri to select MRI
146 mode. The pseudo-op ``.mri 1'' will switch into the MRI mode until the ``.mri
147 0'' is seen; this can be convenient for inline assembler code.
149 Added --defsym SYM=VALUE option.
151 Added -mips4 support to MIPS assembler.
153 Added PIC support to Solaris and SPARC SunOS 4 assembler.
157 Converted this directory to use an autoconf-generated configure script.
159 ARM support, from Richard Earnshaw.
161 Updated VMS support, from Pat Rankin, including considerably improved debugging
164 Support for the control registers in the 68060.
166 Handles (ignores) a new directive ".this_GCC_requires_the_GNU_assembler", to
167 provide for possible future gcc changes, for targets where gas provides some
168 features not available in the native assembler. If the native assembler is
169 used, it should become obvious pretty quickly what the problem is.
171 Usage message is available with "--help".
173 The GNU Assembler Preprocessor (gasp) is included. (Actually, it was in 2.3
174 also, but didn't get into the NEWS file.)
176 Weak symbol support for a.out.
178 A bug in the listing code which could cause an infinite loop has been fixed.
179 Bugs in listings when generating a COFF object file have also been fixed.
181 Initial i386-svr4 PIC implementation from Eric Youngdale, based on code by Paul
184 Improved Alpha support. Immediate constants can have a much larger range now.
185 Support for the 21164 has been contributed by Digital.
187 Updated ns32k (pc532-mach, netbsd532) support from Ian Dall.
191 Mach i386 support, by David Mackenzie and Ken Raeburn.
193 RS/6000 and PowerPC support by Ian Taylor.
195 VMS command scripts (make-gas.com, config-gas.com) have been worked on a bit,
196 based on mail received from various people. The `-h#' option should work again
199 HP-PA work, by Jeff Law. Note, for the PA, gas-2.3 has been designed to work
200 with gdb-4.12 and gcc-2.6. As gcc-2.6 has not been released yet, a special
201 version of gcc-2.5.8 has been patched to work with gas-2.3. You can retrieve
202 this special version of gcc-2.5.8 via anonymous ftp from jaguar.cs.utah.edu
203 in the "dist" directory.
205 Vax support in gas fixed for BSD, so it builds and seems to run a couple simple
206 tests okay. I haven't put it through extensive testing. (GNU make is
207 currently required for BSD 4.3 builds.)
209 Support for the DEC Alpha, running OSF/1 (ECOFF format). The gas support is
210 based on code donated by CMU, which used an a.out-based format. I'm afraid the
211 alpha-a.out support is pretty badly mangled, and much of it removed; making it
212 work will require rewriting it as BFD support for the format anyways.
216 The test suites have been fixed up a bit, so that they should work with a
217 couple different versions of expect and dejagnu.
219 Symbols' values are now handled internally as expressions, permitting more
220 flexibility in evaluating them in some cases. Some details of relocation
221 handling have also changed, and simple constant pool management has been added,
222 to make the Alpha port easier.
224 New option "--statistics" for printing out program run times. This is intended
225 to be used with the gcc "-Q" option, which prints out times spent in various
226 phases of compilation. (You should be able to get all of them printed out with
227 "gcc -Q -Wa,--statistics", I think.)
229 ----------------------------------------------------------------
233 RS/6000 AIX and MIPS SGI Irix 5 support has been added.
235 Configurations that are still in development (and therefore are convenient to
236 have listed in configure.in) still get rejected without a minor change to
237 gas/Makefile.in, so people not doing development work shouldn't get the
238 impression that support for such configurations is actually believed to be
241 The program name (usually "as") is printed when a fatal error message is
242 displayed. This should prevent some confusion about the source of occasional
243 messages about "internal errors".
245 ELF support is falling into place. Support for the 386 should be working.
246 Support for SPARC Solaris is in. HPPA support from Utah is being integrated.
248 Symbol values are maintained as expressions instead of being immediately boiled
249 down to add-symbol, sub-symbol, and constant. This permits slightly more
250 complex calculations involving symbols whose values are not alreadey known.
252 DBX-style debugging info ("stabs") is now supported for COFF formats.
253 If any stabs directives are seen in the source, GAS will create two new
254 sections: a ".stab" and a ".stabstr" section. The format of the .stab
255 section is nearly identical to the a.out symbol format, and .stabstr is
256 its string table. For this to be useful, you must have configured GCC
257 to generate stabs (by defining DBX_DEBUGGING_INFO), and must have a GDB
258 that can use the stab sections (4.11 or later).
260 LynxOS, on i386 and m68k platforms, is now supported. SPARC LynxOS
261 support is in progress.
263 ----------------------------------------------------------------
267 Several small fixes for i386-aix (PS/2) support from Minh Tran-Le have been
268 incorporated, but not well tested yet.
270 Altered the opcode table split for m68k; it should require less VM to compile
273 Some minor adjustments to add (Convergent Technologies') Miniframe support,
274 suggested by Ronald Cole.
276 HPPA support (running OSF only, not HPUX) has been contributed by Utah. This
277 includes improved ELF support, which I've started adapting for SPARC Solaris
278 2.x. Integration isn't completely, so it probably won't work.
280 HP9000/300 support, donated by HP, has been merged in.
282 Ian Taylor has finished the MIPS ECOFF (Ultrix, Irix) support.
284 Better error messages for unsupported configurations (e.g., hppa-hpux).
286 Test suite framework is starting to become reasonable.
288 ----------------------------------------------------------------
294 Some more merging of BFD and ELF code, but ELF still doesn't work.
296 ----------------------------------------------------------------
300 BFD merge is partly done. Adventurous souls may try giving configure the
301 "--with-bfd-assembler" option. Currently, ELF format requires it, a.out format
302 accepts it; SPARC CPU accepts it. It's the default only for OS "elf" or
303 "solaris". (ELF isn't really supported yet. It needs work. I've got some
304 code from Utah for HP-PA ELF, and from DG for m88k ELF, but they're not fully
307 The 68K opcode table has been split in half. It should now compile under gcc
308 without consuming ridiculous amounts of memory.
310 A couple data structures have been reduced in size. This should result in
311 saving a little bit of space at runtime.
313 Support for MIPS, from OSF and Ralph Campbell, has been merged in. The OSF
314 code provided ROSE format support, which I haven't merged in yet. (I can make
315 it available, if anyone wants to try it out.) Ralph's code, for BSD 4.4,
316 supports a.out format. We don't have ECOFF support in just yet; it's coming.
318 Support for the Hitachi H8/500 has been added.
320 VMS host and target support should be working now, thanks chiefly to Eric
323 ----------------------------------------------------------------
327 For m68k, support for more processors has been added: 68040, CPU32, 68851.
329 For i386, .align is now power-of-two; was number-of-bytes.
331 For m68k, "%" is now accepted before register names. For COFF format, which
332 doesn't use underscore prefixes for C labels, it is required, so variable "a0"
333 can be distinguished from the register.
335 Last public release was 1.38. Lots of configuration changes since then, lots
336 of new CPUs and formats, lots of bugs fixed.