> > I guess the thing just needs a bit of testing to *see* if it will work
> > with the older binutils. That's something I'd like to get a feel for: how
> > many people are going to be bit by a bug and need to upgrade. If that
> > number is too high, I'd be happy to drop this idea and start on a patch to
> > change it all to NASM. But if that number isn't so bad, then we can apply
> > the patch, remove the dependency on as86/ld86, and be happy.
>
> This doesn't make a whole lot of sense IMHO. You're afraid of forcing
> people to upgrade to the latest binutils, so instead you want to force
> everyone to install yet *another*, even more obscure package to compile
> their kernel? Just to pick at least one prominent distribution, at least
> Red Hat 6 doesn't even ship NASM on the CD.
Well, what I was trying to say was that if what I'm doing is going to
*force* someone to update something, I'd rather have them go ahead and
update to and start using the latest NASM rather than the latest binutils,
simply because I trust NASM and it's 16-bit code generation quite a bit
more than gas'. And not to mention that NASM was designed to be a full
featured but red-tapeless assembler, while on the other hand gas was
designed to be the backend of gcc.
Hopefully that clears up my position a bit.
Chris Noe
(stiker@northlink.com)
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