[Elftoolchain-developers] What is the policy on adding support for older architectures?

[Kazuo K. <ka...@pr...>]

Hello,

I am an amateur developer from the United States who is currently trying to wrap his head around the terrifying world that is ELF and such. I've been watching this project for a while but after coming to the conclusion that I have very few better options, I wanted to reach out and talk on here a bit. 

One of the architectures that I work with on a regular basis is SGI/MIPS, especially under IRIX. We are facing a situation where there's few good solutions to building software for IRIX in the near future. The IRIX native system toolchain is closed source and difficult to work with. GNU LD/BFD support has never been very good for the OS and even our best version of binutils has numerous bugs. There are also numerous differences and issues with linking that sometimes need nasty hacks to get around. LLVM/LLVM Utils is unlikely to add support for us even if we have a competent developer due to a lack of corporate sponsorship. 

I'm currently willing to learn and figure this out but I do need someone who's a little bit more experienced to help guide me in the right direction at times. So what I'm asking is: 

1. Will support for mips linker/as be upstreamed if we provide quality code? 

2. Will patches for interop with GCC on our platform be considered? 

3. Will I face any friction attempting to add support for a 20-plus year old OS that is frozen in time? 

I'm trying to figure out the best way to go forward with my attempts. Almost nobody in our community actually wants to touch GNU bfd, so I want something that's way less complicated and pain in the ass to deal with. 

Let me know if this group is amenable to helping me out when the time comes? I'm probably going to start with a mips Linux qemu or something similar, get it building/functioning on there, then add patches that will work for SGI IRIX. 

Thanks!

Kaz Kuroi