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2. GNU Binary Utilities - Version 2.9.5.0.xx

2.1 Introduction

H.J. Lu currently maintains a set of patches against the current binutils source found in the latest snapshots and the binutils CVS tree from http://sourceware.cygnus.com.

At the present time, no patches are required for the ARM port of this source tree.

One change of note between binutils version 2.9.1.0.25 is the target name used by the linker. The current version of collect2 distributed with GCC 2.95.1 expects the linker to support a target of elf32arm. The latest binutils source has been changed to support a target of arm-linux. This change is a result of the merging to disparate ELF implementations; one by Cygnus and the other by Phil Blundell, Pat Bierne and Rebel.com.

Another noteworthy item is the two versions of binutils produce object modules that are not quite binary compatible. To force binary compatibility use the -p flag on the linker command line.

Later versions of the compiler have been modified been modified to add this switch to their LINK_SPEC. Thus the switch it is automatically passed to the linker by gcc.

2.2 Known Bugs - Version 2.9.5.0.xx

There are no known problems with these binary utilities. There are no test suite failures.


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