[vmips] VMIPS news for 10-Jun-2004

[Brian R. Gaeke]

VMIPS news for 10-Jun-2004
**************************

Hi there! This update covers changes to the VMIPS CVS HEAD since the
last VMIPS news was sent out on 31-March.

It's definitely getting to be time for a release. :-) I have fixed most of
the problems I know about, except for the DECstation serial device bugs
in interrupt mode; those will have to wait for some future release. Once
I rewrite the Installation section of the manual (also known as the
INSTALL file), I will make a vmips-1_2-branch, and make a 1.2 release
candidate available.

Documentation changes:
======================

* I've nearly finished updating the documentation for the impending
  vmips-1.2 release, with the exception of the Installation section.
* The NEWS file has been integrated into the VMIPS manual, and the INSTALL
  and NEWS files in the VMIPS distribution are now automatically generated
  from the manual using an Elisp script.  The NEWS file now contains
  release dates for all VMIPS public releases.

Configure & Makefile changes:
=============================

* Warn, don't exit with an error, when MIPS tools are not configured.
  Don't build sample_code or test_code directories when MIPS tools are not
  configured.
* Don't use mips-objdump -i to determine the MIPS BFD target or endianness
  if mips-objdump cannot be run!
* The TARGET_LITTLE_ENDIAN, TARGET_BIG_ENDIAN, WORDS_BIGENDIAN, BYTESWAPPED, and
  ENDIAN_FLAG C preprocessor macros have been made redundant. Instead, we rely
  on the machine->host_bigendian flag to tell us about the host machine, and
  on the "-o bigendian" command-line option to tell us about the simulated
  MIPS target.
* The --disable-debug configure flag was documented to strip the vmips and
  vmipstool binaries, but this was not the case. Now it does (unless profiling
  is on.)
* Many autoconf checks for functions guaranteed by the ISO C++ standard
  are skipped now.

Tracing framework changes:
==========================

* The tracing framework is now more usefully controllable using command-line
  options: see the documentation for "-o tracestartpc" and "-o traceendpc"
  in CVS.

Vmipstool changes:
==================

* vmipstool now shares vmips's command-line parsing and error reporting code.
  This means it can now read your ~/.vmipsrc and accept "-o ..." options
  (though not all of them are meaningful to vmipstool).  Also, the
  command-line parsing code no longer uses the C library getopt().
* We no longer hardcode the path of MIPS cross-tools using a C
  preprocessor macro into the vmipstool binary. Instead, vmipstool now
  gets it from .vmipsrc or /etc/vmipsrc (using the "-o mipstoolprefix"
  option) now.

Share and Enjoy,
-Brian

-- 
Brian R. Gaeke, brg at dgate.org -- GnuPG encrypted mail gleefully accepted