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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
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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
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