Re: [PATCH] Kernel fixes for Cygwin

[Christian Franke <Christian.Franke@t-online.de>]

Bean wrote:
> On Mon, Jul 21, 2008 at 6:33 PM, Christian Franke
> <Christian.Franke@t-online.de> wrote:
>   
>> Hi,
>>
>> due to the complexity of PE, a stand-alone converter may likely be
>> larger than the ~680 LoC converter I already offered here. It was
>> rejected, see this thread:
>> http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/grub-devel/2007-11/msg00174.html
>>
>>     
>
> Hi,
>
> I can't find the source code for your converter, perhaps you can repost it ?
>
>   

I did not post it in the original thread from 2007-11.

It is actually a reduced version of objcopy with
- stuff not necessary for object format conversion removed,
- some functions from shared modules added to make it self-contained,
- the fix for the pc-relative relocation added to

It was intended as starting point to get rid of the hack in kern/i386/dl.c.

The hard work is still done by BFD.


> IMO, it's better to use our own tool, if it's not very complicated. I
> learn this lesson when writing efi support for x86_64. The gnu-efi
> toolchain can produce efi image, but it turns out to have some
> limitation on relocation, and it's hard to fix. I end up modifying
> grub-mkimage to support converting elf to pe32+. Relying on external
> tool means we are at the mercy of them, it's annoying when they have
> issue, as we can't expect upstream to fix it soon.
>
>   

Yes, an own tool is probably best in the long term.

But such a tool will be likely not available for GRUB 1.97 tarball release.

Christian