Re: [PATCH] Kernel fixes for Cygwin

[Pavel Roskin <proski@gnu.org>]

On Mon, 2008-07-21 at 13:02 +0200, Javier Martín wrote:
> El lun, 21-07-2008 a las 12:33 +0200, Christian Franke escribió:
> > due to the complexity of PE, a stand-alone converter may likely be
> > larger than the ~680 LoC converter I already offered here.
> Why do we even consider a PE->ELF converter? I think the easier way to
> go would have the people building GRUB in cygwin (not exactly newbies)
> to have an i386-pc-elf "cross compiler" built first, then use that for
> the bootloader programs and the normal gcc for tools. Even a "naked"
> (i.e. libraryless) cross compiler would work, since the bootloader part
> of GRUB is does not need libs (in C terminology, it's "freestanding").
> That way, we are free from "objcopy bugs" or "BFD design limitations".

Well, if we want users to recompile their toolchain first, it's too much
to ask.

Maybe we could treat ELF header like a multiboot header?  That means
that we write the header fields in the assembly language, substitute the
necessary variables and ask objcopy to make a raw binary that would
actually be an ELF file?

We could actually do it for all platforms, so that we won't depend on
the object file format.

-- 
Regards,
Pavel Roskin