Introduction

This document is a set of notes on porting to the MIPS ABI. It is written using GNU Texinfo so that it can be displayed using the info program, which provides a basic hypertext capability. You should get the texinfo-3.1.tar.gz file from an archive site near you to view it. Use makeinfo to generate an info file, then info -f mipsABI.FAQ to view it. The info program will provide help if given the h command. There is also an xinfo program available, which provides an X Toolkit-based interface to the info system. The html version you are currently reading was directly converted from the Texinfo source.

Hard copy can be produced if TeX is available; use texi2dvi from the texinfo package. A plain text version of the info file is also available as file mipsABI.text (made by stripping control information from the info file).

This information is not the standard. The standard is defined by the Conformance Guide (see black book). (The Conformance Guide is also informally referred to as the Black Book). In case of a dispute, refer to the official standards documents. This document is intended to be a quick place to look things up, and does not in any way eliminate the need to read and understand the standard.

Much of the programming information has to do with porting from a BSD-flavor environment to an SVR4-flavor environment. Many popular systems, including IRIX 4 and SunOS, have some BSD flavor to them, but also have non-BSD aspects, so included examples may or may not be directly applicable. Other issues are POSIX support (for signals and other things), porting to ANSI C, and using IEEE math. There are much more complete works available regarding such code transitions. Again, this is only a collection of pointers, not an absolute reference.

Quick instructions: if you read nothing else in this faq, these instructions will still get you going:

Compile ABI applications using abicc. To make an ABI DSO, build the objects first using abicc, then use abild on the collection of objects to make the DSO. Check ABI applications using check_abi_compliance. Manual pages are available on the IRIX Reference Platform for these utilities.

v1.4 L/M 6/15/94