Hi,
Richard van den Berg wrote:
>
> On Sun, 31 Jan 1999 ralf@uni-koblenz.de wrote:
>
> > On Sat, Jan 30, 1999 at 06:57:15PM +0100, Richard van den Berg wrote:
> >
> > > That's because of lack of a.out support of binutils, and as far as I
> > > understand will never happen in the official binutils. The solution for
> > > this is described at
> > > http://www.inter.nl.net/users/schnecke/html/mips/netboot.html
> >
> > I removed the a.out support from the binutils because I though nobody
> > would have any use for it anymore. Some time ago I discussed this with
> > Harald, his answer did was that there would be no real reason to add it
> > back.
>
> Perhaps because the need for it lasts longer then Harald expected.
Well, simply because nobody changed it. I focussed on getting the ball
rolling instead of makeing the building process clean :-).
> > If there is a good reason to add a.out back, just say so. It's
> > really a trivial change.
>
> It's only needed to get a DECstation loading Linux ;-) I've build a rpm
> package and load that up to decstation.unix-ag.org for as short as it is
> needed.
A trivial change to head.S and a little bit of makefile/linker script
wizardy would not only make support for a.out unnecessary but would add
back initrd support for _all_ MIPS platforms. This might be handy when
it comes to installing Linux.
Later,
Harald
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