Rainer Orth <r...@cebitec.uni-bielefeld.de> writes: > * IRIX before 6.5: > > ** IRIX 5.3 entered retired mode by the end of 1998. Patches are no > longer available from support.sgi.com, and a full bootstrap and test > cycle takes 8 1/2 days on the machines I have available, even without > java/libgcj. > > ** IRIX 6.2 entered retired mode by 01/2003 and patches aren't available > either. I don't have any machine available running that version. > > ** IRIX 6.3 and 6.4 were only ever released for specific hardware. > > ** With a few exceptions, all machines supported by IRIX 6.[2-4] are > supported by IRIX 6.5, too (at least until 6.5.22).
Sounds like a good plan ;) > ** I also consider obsoleting support for the O32 ABI: the SGI linker used > is different from the N32/N64 ld, and has repeatedly caused problems > which couldn't be resolved even when SGI still had full IRIX > support. Also, the ISO C99 support in libc is only available for the > N32 and N64 ABIs. Yeah, that's a difficult one. On the one hand, I can see that it doesn't make sense to support an ABI that was there for compatibility with IRIX 5 and earlier (which we're declaring obselete). On the other, I think o32 worked better with the GNU linker than it did with the SGI linker. E.g. I remember hitting GOT overflow problems with the SGI o32 linker (which didn't support multiple GOTs) that were solved by using the GNU linker. But that was a long time ago (binutils 2.15?) and I don't know how well it works now. And I still can't see any reason why IRIX 6.5 users would prefer o32 over n32. I certainly don't object to removing o32 support from the IRIX port. Richard
