Re: serial consoles, sash and other wonders

[Ralf Baechle <ralf@Julia.DE>]

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