Hi,
> By the way, it is pretty easy to write a little program to convert
> a kernel ELF binary to an ECOFF binary, discarding most of the symbols and
> other stuff, assuming you have the header files for the file formats.
> (The result would not be acceptable to many of the tools, such as dbx,
> but it would be bootable.)
>
> For a production linux for the Indy, the most reasonable approach,
> however, would be to make silo or whatever boot program you are using be
> ECOFF, so that old PROMs are supported.
I also have to deal with ARC machines (the little endian NT stuff). By
definiton they have to support ECOFF; everything else is optional. This
brings in the extra issue that the loader needs to be relocatable.
MIPS-ECOFF configurations of GCC can't do that and the linker dies when
loading ELF PIC code into an ECOFF executable. Unfortunately fixing is
nontrivial.
The {Net,Open}BSD people already have a converter tool which they use to
generate their kernel executable. It would solve the ld problems.
I did some work on it and I should probably finish it ...
Ralf
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