Ali Bahrami writes:
> We're not aware of any missing symbol visibility support in the
> Solaris linker relative to the GNU ld, and believe that all of
> this stuff has been stable and present for years. STV_PROTECTED
> and friends went into Solaris 9 (PSARC/2000/267), so backports
> may not even be necessary.
Do you know if this went into Solaris 9 FCS, or some update release? In
the former case one could get away with a version test in gcc/configure.ac,
in the latter either a feature test would be necessary (any suggestions on
how to test this?) or one would need to be conservative and assume that Sun
ld only support visibility in Solaris 10 and up.
> We don't work on the assemblers, but have no reason to think
> that they're lacking in this area either.
Same problem: did the support appear in some FCS release or was it
delivered via updates/patches? This doesn't affect Solaris/x86, anyway:
unless you restrict yourself to a 32-bit-only GCC, gas is required because
Sun as lacks (or lacked, I haven't tested this in a long time) some
features necessary for amd64 support.
> I think the next step forward would be to ask the gcc community
> why their configuration makes this assumption about the non-GNU
> ld on Solaris. Perhaps it's a historical artifact and could just
> be changed.
GCC still supports older Solaris versions, so it either needs to check for
the presence of a feature or make the most conservative assumption on when
some specific feature was introduced.
> If there *is* a lack in the Solaris toolchain for visibility,
> we would very much appreciate a concrete report detailing
> what's missing so that we can address it.
The problem here seems to be primarily that nobody really cares too much
about GCC on Solaris: SPARC maintenance is largely dormant these days and
while some GCC users test SVN versions on releases on Solaris/x86, nobody
does so regularly. I seem to be the only one who tries to test and fix
stuff (I even happen to have commit access), but this is not my day job.
If I find that something is missing in recent versions of Solaris, I'll
certainly report it.
Rainer
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Rainer Orth, Faculty of Technology, Bielefeld University
