[fpc-devel] Questions regarding m68k-atari target

[Thorsten Otto]

On Dienstag, 25. Januar 2022 12:22:33 CET Karoly Balogh wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> On Tue, 25 Jan 2022, Thorsten Otto via fpc-devel wrote:
> > Yes, a.out support (which is used on Atari) has been dropped in 2.31.
> > But i've added it back in, and cross-binutils of 2.34 can be found at
> > http://tho-otto.de/crossmint.php#binutils
> 
> Won't really help. As you found out already, section smartlinking won't
> work with a.out. It never worked in any version of binutils on any
> platform. Actually I went the vasm/vlink route, because the AS/LD versions
> I found online at the time I worked on the port, crashed hard on me on
> EmuTOS/Hatari, and vasm/vlink just worked. Plus the vasm/vlink combo
> supported section-based smartlinking. This is something actually I
> requested from Frank Wille to be added to vlink, and he was nice enough to
> add it for us. It's used on Amiga, Atari, and the Sinclair QL. Just for
> reference without some kind of smartlinking, we'd end up having a 300K-ish
> hello world... Instead of 25K-ish... So yeah.
> 
> (We do support individual .o/.a based smartlinking too, that should work
> for Atari as well, but you'll literally end up growing roots, it's so
> slow, I promise. So it just wasn't practical...)
> 
> > That does not mean that the section based linking will work. I'll have
> > to check whether that can somehow be supported.
> 
> I based on my experience with customized binutils, recommend against
> fighting with this. I'd much rather just generate an ELF binary, where all
> the shiny features are available and tested, then convert it with some
> tool to a native binary for the target. Actually we have several platforms
> which do this or something similar already. If I'm not mistaken, GCC for
> Atari used to have some tool like this? Brownout, maybe?
> 
> > Yes, but when i use gas, i think fpc won't generate the required section
> > directives?
> 
> This is intentional. FPC knows that GAS for Atari uses a.out (or used at
> the time, when I wired this together), and avoids generation sections,
> because they just didn't work (they didn't even compile back then).
> 
> Anyway, all of this is 2017-18 wisdom, or so. I haven't looked into your
> updated binutils yet, so feel free to correct me regarding it, if
> something which hasn't been supported before now is. :)
> 
> Cheers,
> --
> Charlie

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