Problems with linker on Alpha
Richard,
I hope you don't mind an email sent to you personally regarding problems
with the linker on Alpha (I've also CCed the debian-alpha and binutils
mail lists).
I've noted some problems with ld on Alpha and am wanting to put some
effort into fixing them but will need a bit of guidance and assistance.
First off is bug 12608 [1] which I believe I have identified the problem
and have posted a patch to the bug tracker. I am hoping that if it is
acceptable that you can commit it.
Secondly, I noted a number of test suite failures in the ld component
while building binutils. Some of them are with plugins which might
explain why bugs/crashes seem to randomly appear and disappear with
larger software packages using plugins. I would like to investigate the
test suite failures but am yet to understand the automated system using
expect and isolate each test so that I can run them manually. Are you
able to give me a bit of guidance on that?
Thirdly, a number of large C++ programs (such as firefox/xulrunner,
webkit, libreoffice) bomb out with GPREL16 relocation truncation errors
when using the -relax option but link successfully when using
--no-relax. I have reopened bug 5276 [2] which describes this problem.
It would be nice to get this problem fixed!
Fourthly, the Debian supplied gcc-4.6 fails to build on Debian because
of a boostrap comparison failure, so I attempted to build upstream
gcc-4.6 branch source which got past the bootstrap comparison but failed
later on with the following error:
/usr/bin/ld: BFD (GNU Binutils for Debian) 2.21.51.20110419 internal
error, aborting at ../../bfd/elf64-alpha.c line 2064 in
elf64_alpha_gc_sweep_hook
when linking libstdc++. This is using the Debian supplied bintuils
version 2.21.51.20110419-2, also with my patch to fix the TLS issue.
Maybe I should make a bug entry for it.
So there are a number of issues that I would like to work on but while I
believe I solved bug 12608 some of the others are more challenging and I
need some guidance to be able to make (or speed up) progress. I should
be grateful if you could assist!
Cheers
Michael.
[1] http://sourceware.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=12608
[2] http://sourceware.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=5276
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