
This release of binutils includes an assembler and linker targeted for
the IBM 360/370/390 (mainframe) instruction set.  Currently,
only ELF-style binaries are generated, and the input assembly
must be elf-style assembly produced by gcc/egcs.

HLASM-style assembly is *not* supported (although some of the pieces
required for this *are* in place, and the rest might not be too hard to add.)

OpenEdition XSD or ESD style binaries are *not* supported; this would
require writing a whole new XSD/ESD back end, which would be a lot of work.

This assembler is still highly experimental.  It includes support
for both user and supervisor state instructions.  It does not include
support for vector facility instructions.   It does not (currently) 
make any distinction between the wide multitude of different 370 
implementations and facilities.

It seems to geenrate more or less correct code, although this has not been 
heavily tested yet.  It was written by Linas Vepstas <linas@linas.org>
between november 1998 and february 1999

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This assembler can be built as a cross-assembler on i386-linux-gnu systems.
To do so, it (should) suffice to perform the following steps:

configure --target=i370-ibm-linux --enable-shared \
	--prefix=/where/you/want/it/installed
make
make install

If this doesn't work for you, try playing with aclocal, automake, and
autoconf in the various subdirectories giving you trouble.

--linas november 1998

