Hi Guys,
Sorry for the delay in bringing you this update; I have been very
busy in the last few months. Anyway the highlights of the changes
to the GNU Toolchain are as follows:
* The GDB 7.10 branch has been created. Expect a release soon.
* Support for tracepoints on aarch64-linux was added in GDBserver.
* A point update of the FSF Binutils - 2.25.1 - has been released.
No new features but lots of important bug fixes.
* GCC 5.2 has been released. This is a bug-fix update to the
previous 5.1 release.
* The linker now has experimental support for the removal of
redundant sections from COFF and PE format files. This is
enabled via the --gc-sections linker command line option.
* A new linker command line option --require-defined=<symbol> has
been added. This behaves in much the same way as the
--undefined=<sym> option in that it creates a reference to an
undefined symbol that should force a library to be pulled into
the link or garbage collection not to remove a specific section.
The difference between --require-defined and --undefined is that
with the former the linker will issue an error message if the
specified symbol has not been defined by the end of the link.
* The --disassemble (or -d) and --disassemble-all (or -D) options to
objdump have received a subtle change. With -d objdump will
assume that any symbols present in a code section occur on the
boundary between instructions and so it will refuse to disassemble
across such a boundary. With -D however this assumption is
suppressed. This means that it is possible for the output of
-d and -D to differ if, for example, data is stored in a code
section.
* GCC has a couple of new warning options available:
-Wframe-address
This generates a warning when the __builtin_frame_address or
__builtin_return_address are called with an argument greater than
0. Such calls may return indeterminate values or crash the
program.
-Wtautological-compare
This generates a warning if a self-comparison always evaluates to
true or false. This detects various mistakes such as:
int i = 1;
if (i > i) { ... }
* With the Nios II port of GCC it is now possible to specify the
target architecture variant with -march=r1 or -march=r2. It is
also possible to explicitly enable or disable the use of the r2
BMX (bit manipulation) and CDX (code density) instructions via the
use of the new -mbmx -mno-bmx -mcdx and -mno-cdx options.
Cheers
Nick
