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From: Ricky Charlet <rcharlet@redcreek.com> Date: Fri, 10 Nov 2000 09:54:11 -0700 In further reading, I have found out that ecoff was an old (and from what I read unsucessful) attempt to develop a binary object encoding format which would apply to a large range of processors and become an open standard. elf format is more mips specific. This is more or less incorrect. ECOFF (Extended COFF, where COFF means Common Object File Format) was invented to extend the COFF format to handle some peculiar details required by the MIPS architecture, such as the GP register. ECOFF was used on Digital's Ultrix, and was therefore also used for the Alpha in the Digital backed OSF/1, later called Digital Unix. I don't believe that ECOFF has ever been used for anything other than the MIPS and the Alpha. ELF, like COFF before it, was invented by AT&T when it was in charge of Unix. ELF was introduced with SVR4 (COFF was introduced with SVR3). It is a portable format used by a wide range of processors, including MIPS. Although it was necessary to extend COFF to make it support MIPS, ELF is a more flexible format, and no special extensions were required for MIPS support. Now I am makeing an infernece here, the rest of this is not something I've read. Because ecoff is quite old, and there seems to be no such mips64-ecoff target I assume that MIPS III & IV ISA (with the 64 bit modes) were defined only in mips elf formats. And therefore mips64-elf is the only target which will run a mips chip in 64 bit mode. As far as I know, nobody has ever produced a mips64 machine which uses the ECOFF format. Ian ------ Want more information? See the CrossGCC FAQ, http://www.objsw.com/CrossGCC/ Want to unsubscribe? Send a note to crossgcc-unsubscribe@sourceware.cygnus.com
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