Hi Pete,
I believe it's the target normalisation in config.sub (line 1055) that does it:mips3*-*) cpu=mips64 ;;
Interesting...
That doesn't seem quite right to me but I don't know much about binutils to know what the rationale is for that transformation.
I have no idea why that is there, but it does look strange, I agree. In this particular case however the binutils are not to blame as the config.sub file (and the config.guess file) are actually taken from a different project: https://savannah.gnu.org/projects/config/ We just use copies of the files from that project. We synchronize the files occasionally, usually just before an official release.
TL;DR - I've got something that (I think...) works now by using 'mips- mti-elf',
Good, I shall now stop panicking. :-)
but I'm unsure whether my initial post about the 'mips32-*' targets being silently coalesced into 'mips64-*' by the configure scripts is a bug or not, nor what the fix would be. I'm happy to raise a bug report if you think that config.sub clause is a typo.
If you feel motivated, please do take this issue up with the config project. If it caused problems for you then it is likely to cause problems for other people in the future. So fixing it, or at least adding a comment explaining the reasoning to the config.sub file, would be a good thing. Cheers Nick
