> > It allows me to boot all Indys and O2s off the same binary. Nice for boot
> > CDs. Especially that Octanes and Origins should be bootable from another
> > one... just like IRIX.
> Do they use a different load address so that you keep an "almost fully
> linked" relocatable (i.e. with all objects already included, but still
> done with "-r") and do the final link differently for each of them?
Yes, exactly.
> If this is the case you should be able to keep that "almost fully
> linked" relocatable as ELF and then just do the final link using ELF
> and then `objcopy' to ECOFF.
I tried objcopy (it was my first thought), for one reason or another it
didn't work (internal BFD error something). Reportedly ECOFF is belly-up
in current GNU binutils - at least it is what I heard.
> Trying to support GNU extensions in ECOFF is probably hopeless and not
> worth the hassle and the file format is likely to be obsoleted by the
> toolchain soon (if not already done), except from BFD -- which'll let you
> continue doing `objcopy', `objdump', etc.
My input is elf32-tradbigmips. So I entirely don't care for binutils'
ECOFF anymore, and I consider this a good thing. As I said, objcopy didn't
work at all. Fixing BFD is not my job (it's a monster of Frankensteinian
proportions), I think that it is actually much easier to write my own
converter (well, I did it, and it works - except that funny HI/LO mismatch
I'm going to work around).
Stanislaw
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