[Bug gold/13213] New: Gold does not support the BE-8 big-endian variant of the ARM architecture

[mgretton at sourceware dot org]

http://sourceware.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=13213

             Bug #: 13213
           Summary: Gold does not support the BE-8 big-endian variant of
                    the ARM architecture
           Product: binutils
           Version: unspecified
            Status: NEW
          Severity: normal
          Priority: P2
         Component: gold
        AssignedTo: address@hidden
        ReportedBy: address@hidden
    Classification: Unclassified
            Target: arm-none-eabi


Gold only supports the BE-32 (word-invariant) big-endian variant of the ARM
architecture (supported in v4, v5, and optionally v6).  v6 and v7 introduce
BE-8 variant (byte invariant).

One of the major features of the BE-8 variant is that all instructions are in
little-endian format, whereas they are big-endian in BE-32.

The ABI
(http://infocenter.arm.com/help/topic/com.arm.doc.ihi0044d/IHI0044D_aaelf.pdf)
section 5.5.1 says that object files are produced in BE-32 format and when the
linker produces a BE-8 executable image it byte reverses instructions back to
little endian format (word-by-word for ARM, half-word-by-half-word for Thumb). 
BE-8 executable files have the processor specific flag EF_ARM_BE8 set on the
image.

The implication of this is that currently Gold cannot produce images that will
run correctly in big-endian mode on ARM v7-A CPUs.

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