Re: binutils patches for GNAT NT

[Mumit Khan <khan at NanoTech dot Wisc dot EDU>]

Pascal Obry <obry@paris.act-europe.fr> writes:
> 
> For the last two years we have been improving the NT binutils as distributed
> with GNAT. Most enhancements are directed towards better NT and Mingw32
> integration, but we have also extended the object format generated by 'as' 
> to make it more MS compatible.

Excellent news! I look forward to your changes.

> We are now planing to move toward a newer binutils and applying our patches t
> o
> this new version. We will begin this work soon and we will produce a .dif fil
> e
> with all the patches to be applied to the latest binutils sources. After many
> years using these fixes we have a lot of confidence in them

Let's hope you're not going to run into too many problems with a newer
binutils, where the PE code has been extensively modified since older
binutils releases. In case you didn't know, the latest sourceware tree 
is somewhat broken for x86-pe, so you may run into trouble because of 
that. I can send you some glue patches to get it working again for 
x86-pe. The two things that are problematic are:
 
1. ImageBase is not set correctly. My local tree fixes that with a change
   to bfd/peigen.c (_bfd_pei_swap_aouthdr_out, pe_print_*).
2. There are issues with gas relocation. I have a patch from a
   contributor, but he doesn't have assignment with FSF. 

I also have a few minor changes to binutils, gas and ld, but those are 
mostly either small enhancements or trivial bug fixes.

> We would like to share the work we have done, and where possible integrate
> them with the current binutils. If you are interested in cooperation, and if
> so, what would be the best way to proceed from here ?

Easiest way is to just post it to binutils list (or if too big, put up an 
URL for it). See http://sourceware.cygnus.com/binutils/ for list details.

Regards,
Mumit