The as/fbe software falls in the organization that owns the Sun Studio tools. They currently have a severe doc resource shortage.
If you have a large number of bugs on the same topic, you might want to create a wiki page that can be updated without dealing with the bug systems. For doc issues, multiple people might be able to better collaborate on collecting the necessary information in one place. Then at least you can use the wiki page as an addendum to the manual. Just a thought. If you're inclined to do that, please feel free to create a new page on the Sun Studio (I mean Oracle Solaris Studio) wiki: http://wikis.sun.com/display/SunStudio/Home --chris Rainer Orth wrote: > Within my duties as Solaris GCC maintainer, I'm currently testing GCC > mainline with several different toolchains: Sun as and ld, GNU as and > Sun ld, and GNU as and ld, to check for feature parity and bugs in the > various combinations. > > During that work, I found that the assembler documentation is seriously > lacking: > > * The SPARC Assembly Language Reference Manual was last updated in 2002, > the x86 Assembly Language Reference Manual in 2005. > > * The important information to anyone writing assembler input (either > directly or in a compiler) are the details of the assembler directives > understood. This section is both incomplete (understandable given the > age of the manuals, e.g. there's no information on the .group > directive) and lacks syntactic and semantic detail necessary to use > it. > > * Assembler error messages are not explained at all; some of them are > unfortunately all but self-explaining. > > All this caused me to either try and discover missing information by > trial and error, looking at Studio cc/CC -S output, and perhaps looking at > the Solaris 9 as sources from the edu source program, though they are > quite dated by now. > > It would be very good to remedy this situation: I consider the Linker > and Libraries Guide to be exemplary in this regard: it contains both > conceptual/high-level information on the concepts, lots of examples, and > reference chapters with all the details necessary to understand and > dissect object files. Bryan Cantrill once mentioned to me that they > strived to reach that standard with the DTrace Manual :-) > > I've no idea if there is any documentation inside Sun that could be used > to improve the existing manuals. Perhaps it's conceivable that the > as/fbe sources can be open-sourced, so at least one could look at the > source to discover missing information. > > In the meantime, I've filed a couple of bugs/RFEs at bugs.sun.com, with > more to come. I suppose this is the best place to do so, > bugs.opensolaris.org might be an alternative, though as/fbe bugs won't > be visible there. Unfortunately, none of them have been acknowledged > yet, and I'm reluctant to file more until I can be assured that they are > not lost completely. > > Comments? > > Thanks, > Rainer >
