dupuy@CS.COLUMBIA.EDU (Alexander Dupuy) (09/26/89)
Currently, gas cannot be used to build an unmodified Sun kernel, due to the lack of support for the .bss directive. I don't know how major a change it would be to support this for the 68k and sparc architectures, and whether it would require changes to all the machine-dependent variants to support it, but it would be useful. In case you don't know what the Sun .bss directive does, I quote from the Sun Assembly Language Reference Manual: "These sections are equivalent as for as "as" is concerned, eith the exception that no instructions or data are generated for the bss section - only its size is computed and its symbol values are output." I tried it out, and it's correct. You can use any sort of assembler in the bss section, but everything except the size and location of symbols is ignored. Thanks. @alex -- inet: dupuy@cs.columbia.edu uucp: ...!rutgers!cs.columbia.edu!dupuy
dupuy@CS.COLUMBIA.EDU (Alexander Dupuy) (09/27/89)
After reading my previous message on this, I realize it is somewhat less than coherent. The .bss directive is basically the same as the .data or .text directives, except that it (1) only calculates sizes and symbol offsets, and doesn't generate any initializations, and (2) puts those symbols in the bss csect, rather than the text or data csects. You could probably figure that out from my message and the suggestive name of the .bss directive, but I thought I'd make it clear. @alex