I have noticed that under egcs 1.0.2 I get a core dump with the following
small program.

#include <time.h>

int main(){
struct tm date = {tm_sec: 0, tm_min: 0, tm_hour: 0, tm_mday: 27, tm_mon: 9, 
  tm_year: 97, tm_wday: 0, tm_yday: 0, tm_isdst: 0, tm_gmtoff: 0, 
  tm_zone: 0x0};
  char *p;
  (void) mktime(&date);
  p = asctime(&date);
  printf("%s\n", p);
}


It appears that localtime.c has not been compiled correctly with the -fpic
option. This problem seems to have gone away with later versions of egcs
so I would be interested to see if we have it in the 1.4 beta build.

I haven't had time to upgrade, so I would be interested if someone could test
this for me.

An even simpler test to to compile

static int foo (void *p)
{
  return p == foo;
}

with

cc -fpic -S

It should produce something like:

#NO_APP
gcc2_compiled.:
___gnu_compiled_c:
.text
	.align 2
	.type	 _foo,@function
_foo:
	enter [],0
	sprd sb,tos
	addr __GLOBAL_OFFSET_TABLE_(pc),r0
	lprd sb,r0
	cmpd 8(fp),_foo(sb)
	seqd r0
	lprd sb,tos
	exit []
	ret 0
Lfe1:
	.size	 _foo,Lfe1-_foo

If it produces

#NO_APP
gcc2_compiled.:
___gnu_compiled_c:
.text
	.align 2
	.type	 _foo,@function
_foo:
	enter [],0
	cmpd 8(fp),_foo(sb)
	seqd r0
	exit []
	ret 0
Lfe1:
	.size	 _foo,Lfe1-_foo

then there is a problem. It seems to be that the -fpic is handling ordinary
global symbols OK, but is not generating a global offset table or initializing
sb if the symbol happens to be a function entry point.

As far as I can tell, this has been fixed in later versions of egcs with
no changes to the MD code in the compiler, hence it may be a MI problem.

Ian