Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!CS.COLUMBIA.EDU!dupuy From: dupuy@CS.COLUMBIA.EDU (Alexander Dupuy) Newsgroups: gnu.utils.bug Subject: Request for enhancement to GAS Message-ID: <8909260331.AA21909@cs.columbia.edu> Date: 26 Sep 89 03:31:46 GMT Sender: daemon@tut.cis.ohio-state.edu Reply-To: dupuy@cs.columbia.edu Distribution: gnu Organization: GNUs Not Usenet Lines: 22 Currently, gas cannot be used to build an unmodified Sun kernel, due to the lack of support for the .bss directive. I don't know how major a change it would be to support this for the 68k and sparc architectures, and whether it would require changes to all the machine-dependent variants to support it, but it would be useful. In case you don't know what the Sun .bss directive does, I quote from the Sun Assembly Language Reference Manual: "These sections are equivalent as for as "as" is concerned, eith the exception that no instructions or data are generated for the bss section - only its size is computed and its symbol values are output." I tried it out, and it's correct. You can use any sort of assembler in the bss section, but everything except the size and location of symbols is ignored. Thanks. @alex -- inet: dupuy@cs.columbia.edu uucp: ...!rutgers!cs.columbia.edu!dupuy