[fpc-devel] Questions regarding m68k-atari target

[Karoly Balogh]

Hi,

On Tue, 25 Jan 2022, Thorsten Otto via fpc-devel wrote:

> > And of course i have to find out what causes vlink to put that strange
> > program flags in the header.
>
> I think i found the reason for that. The offending lines in vlink/main.c are:
> (...)
> (at this point the option argument has already been checked to start
> with -tos-). fpc passes the arguments "-tos-flags fastload,fastram". So
> what happens is that sscanf does not find a valid number, does not write
> any value to "fl", and a (more or less) random value is used as
> gv->tosflags.

Whoops. Good catch. I agree this is a bug in vlink, so I think I'll report
this to Frank Wille. At least the fact that it should error on invalid
argument. And of course FPC should pass the right thing.

> So the documentation in vlink is a bit misleading. It either supports
> "-tos-flags <number>, or alternatively -tos-fastalloc, -tos-fastram
> etc., but not the syntax fpc uses. That should be changed to "-tos-flags
> 7" instead.

Indeed, I misunderstood the documentation back then. This actually
explains some weird random things I've been experiencing with the TOS
version all along, so thanks a lot!

> gnu-ld has a similar switch, but it already uses 7 as default, so there
> is need to change that too. vlink should imho also be changed to check
> that a valid number was passed, but that's another issue ;)

So at least in FPC I fixed this in b3cbf07. Free Pascal (main branch) now
passes "-tos-flags 7" to vlink, and also allows to override that 7 value
using the newly introduced platform specific -WF parameter.

Further details I've posted to the Atari Forum topic.

Cheers,
--
Charlie