Re: [Fwd: Current state of MIPS16 support?]

At Thu, 6 Jun 2002 10:14:33 +0100 (BST), Dominic Sweetman wrote:

Difference in perception here.

Noted.

Up to and including the 2.96+ release we currently work with, no GCC
version we've taken on has been fit for use by our MIPS customers
without a large number of fixes, including significant changes to
nominally non-machine-dependent code.

If you experienced a big improvement in quality on moving to some more
recent version, I'd love to know and that's worth telling everyone.

But if you're saying "it's always been more or less all right" then we
are bound to suspect you're not looking hard enough...

"I don't know."  I didn't really spend a _lot_ of time staring at the
gnu toolchain until about 2 or 3 years ago (mips tools, 2 or so years
8-).  Before that, i relied on tools that others had massaged ... and
invariably, yes, they did have at least a few "important" bug fixes
(often pulled in from later development versions of the tools).  I
think even going back 2 and change years, we had some problems with
the versions of gcc at that time, and, for some sets of compile flags
(for us, -membedded-pic) a _lot_ of problems with binutils.

As of gcc 3.0.4 and w/ binutils 2.12.1 (with patches to each, but
generally not bug-fixes .... though we undoubtedly still have a few),
at least for us, they seem to work well for linux and for some amount
of stand-alone embedded development work.

I wouldn't disagree, BTW, that the current tools for mips seem to have
some shortcomings.  I also wouldn't claim that we've comprehensively
tested the tools.  8-)


I think the goal of improving test suites to show additional bugs is a
very good one.  Personally, I've been trying to make sure regression
tests get added for bugs we find & fix, but there will always be more
bugs to find.



chris