From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Received: from mailserv2.iuinc.com (qmailr@mailserv2.iuinc.com [206.245.164.55]) by puffin.external.hp.com (8.8.7/8.8.7) with SMTP id LAA09736 for ; Tue, 1 Jun 1999 11:18:19 -0600 Date: Tue, 1 Jun 1999 19:18:00 +0200 From: Philipp Rumpf To: John David Anglin Cc: Christopher Beard , parisc-linux@thepuffingroup.com Subject: Re: Building the Bootloader Message-ID: <19990601191800.C25364@suse.de> References: <199906011644.MAA25119@hiauly1.hia.nrc.ca> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii In-Reply-To: <199906011644.MAA25119@hiauly1.hia.nrc.ca>; from John David Anglin on Tue, Jun 01, 1999 at 12:44:46PM -0400 List-ID: > If the IPL could be extracted from an ELF binary, then it could be produced > on any system which supports cross compiling to HP/UX ELF format. The problem (unless for the confused ones Christopher just showed the light) is the GNU binutils seem to be buggy at the moment. > There also seems to be some confusion about the kernel and its format. > In order to debug it, it needs to be either an ELF or SOM binary with > symbol tables, .stabs info, etc. In practice, a System.map should be enough and we don't need to keep an ELF binary on the disk. > Although I haven't looked at the IPL, I would guess that it is designed to > load an ELF binary. It isn't. Currently the IPL is stored with a raw kernel image to load and some pointers. Once we have something to boot, we can have a look at how aboot and other bootloaders handle the situation (and steal their code of course). > > I haven't looked at this very closely, but when I attempted to generate a > > raw binary of the bootloader code with the xcompiler/binutils it either > > segfaulted or generated a 4 GB sparse file. There was a double free within > > binutils which was fixed, and some minor version mismatches, but still, it > > does not generate a working binary. > Obviously, the bootloader will be a pain to debug. I think that I have > a working cross compiler running under hpux to produce ELF object files > and binaries. I had a problem with ld which went away when I rebuilt > binutils with no optimization (-O0). We need to get to the point where we can safely cross-compile for parisc machines on i386. My experience with binutils / bfd is rather limited, so I wait for some- one else to do it...