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Re: Patch: Switch Linux/mips to stabs


"Aaron J. Grier" <aaron@frye.com> writes:

> On Fri, Jun 08, 2001 at 07:12:39AM +0200, Maciej W. Rozycki wrote:
> 
> >  Is it really needed to remove ecoff-littlemips and ecoff-bigmips
> > targets from the list of default ones for MIPS/Linux?  COFF is the
> > format used by the firmware of certain MIPS-based machines for
> > network-booting, certainly by DECstations and I'm told that older SGI
> > workstations use this format, too.  While the elf2ecoff tool as
> > bundled with the kernel seem to be sufficient to prepare a suitable
> > COFF image, it's grossly limited in functionality and was added only
> > as a workaround to bugs in binutils.
> 
> Jason Thorpe in the NetBSD camp was able to persuade binutils to
> generate bootable MIPS ECOFF kernels via objcopy.  If objcopy indeed
> works, it would be nice to see elf2ecoff go away.  :)
> 
> The patch to BFD is here:
> 
> http://mail-index.netbsd.org/port-mips/2001/06/07/0001.html

Yes, I spoke with Jason about this.  The basic problem is that the
ECOFF writer does the wrong thing for Jason's purposes if D_PAGED is
set, and there is no way to directly control whether the ELF backend
sets D_PAGED or not.  Jason's patch arranges for the ELF backend to
not set D_PAGED in the particular case that he needs, but that is a
trifle odd.  I don't have time to look into this, but it seems to me
that there must be some clean way to get the ELF backend to not set
D_PAGED.  Anybody want to look into it?

Ian


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