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[rfc] For mips, sign-extended ecoff offsets

Alan Modra alan@linuxcare.com.au
Mon Jun 19 18:50:00 GMT 2000 
On Tue, 20 Jun 2000, Andrew Cagney wrote:

> > I'm worried about what happens if things like PDR.adr get changed from
> > 0xa0000000 to 0xffffffffa0000000.
> 
> Thats why I'm asking :-) Remember though, on the MIPS platform, if
> ``PDR.adr'' is an address then, the canonical form of the value
> ``0xa0000000'' obtained from an elf32 binary is 0xffffffffa00000000. 
> GDB and BFD have, for too many years, been bribed and cajoled into
> perpetuated the lie that MIPS doesn't sign extend addresses.   GDB's now
> decided to come clean on this matter (and purge an amazing amount of
> bogus code :-).

Well, it's the likelihood of other "bogus code" existing in binutils that
assumes addresses are _not_ sign extended that worries me.  If you work to
the "You break it, you fix it" rule, then you may be taking on quite a bit
of work :-)

> Any way I've attached a revised patch.  I wasn't ruthless enough the
> first time....  With this revision the linker appears to work :-) 
> Testing is continuing.

There's an ECOF_ typo still in a comment.

> I guess the question for BFD people is, is this the correct approach to
> fixing this bug?

I'd like to hear Ian's comments on this before you check it in.

Regards, Alan Modra
-- 
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