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HPPA dependent features

See the following documentation for the HPPA architecture’s features and options for the assembler. As a back end for GNU CC, as has been thoroughly tested and should work extremely well. We have tested it only minimally on hand-written assembly code and no one has tested it much on the assembly output from the HP compilers.

The format of the debugging sections has changed since the original as port (version 1.3X) was released; therefore, you must rebuild all HPPA objects and libraries with the new assembler so that you can debug the final executable.

The HPPA as port generates a small subset of the relocations available in the SOM and ELF object file formats. Additional relocation support will be added as it becomes necessary.

Options for HPPA

as has no machine-dependent command-line options for the HPPA.

Syntax for HPPA

The assembler syntax closely follows the HPPA instruction set reference manual; assembler directives and general syntax closely follow the HPPA assembly language reference manual, with a few noteworthy differences.

First, a colon may immediately follow a label definition. This is simply for compatibility with how most assembly language programmers write code.

Some obscure expression parsing problems may affect hand written code which uses the spop instructions, or code which makes significant use of the ! line separator.

as is much less forgiving about missing arguments and other similar oversights than the HP assembler. as notifies you of missing arguments as syntax errors; this is regarded as a feature, not a bug.

Finally, as allows you to use an external symbol without explicitly importing the symbol.
 

Special characters for HPPA targets include the following.

Floating point for HPPA

The HPPA family uses IEEE floating-point numbers.

Assembler directives for HPPA

as for the HPPA supports many additional directives for compatibility with the native assembler. This section describes them only briefly. For detailed information on HPPA-specific assembler directives, see HP9000 Series 800 Assembly Language Reference Manual (HP 92432-90001).

as does not support the following assembler directives described in the HP documentation.

Beyond those implemented for compatibility, as supports one additional assembler directive for the HPPA: .param. It conveys register argument locations for static functions. Its syntax closely follows the .export directive.

The following are the additional directives in as for the HPPA:
 

Opcodes for HPPA

For detailed information on the HPPA machine instruction set, see PA-RISC Architecture and Instruction Set Reference Manual (HP 09740- 90039).


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