Aurelien Jarno wrote: > Thiemo Seufer a écrit : > >Aurelien Jarno wrote: > > > >>On Tue, Apr 18, 2006 at 04:06:46PM -0600, Stuart R. Anderson wrote: > >> > >>>Package: binutils > >>>Version: 2.16.1cvs20060117-1.1 > >>>Severity: important > >>>Tags: patch > >>> > >>>ar (and ranlib) do not correctly identify ELF64 files in an archive. It > >>>complains that > >>>the format is ambiguous. > >>> > >>>cc -mabi=64 -c -o foo.o foo.c > >>>ar cq libfoo.a foo.o > >>>ar t libfoo.a > >>>ar: libfoo.a: File format is ambiguous > >>>ar: Matching formats: ecoff-littlemips ecoff-bigmips elf64-tradlittlemips > >>> > >>>The test case illustrated here is attached. > >>> > >>>A workaround/fix for this is to drop the ecoff format support when > >>>configuring binutils > >>>for mips or mipsel. Has linux ever supported ecoff on mips anyway? > > > > > >There is some linuxy ECOFF support which was used for bootloaders, but > >the kernels were always ELF and also don't support loading ECOFF > >binaries (except probably as binary_misc). > > > > > >>>A patch for this > >>>is also attached. > >>> > >> > >>AFAIK, ecoff support is needed for the kernels, when booting from the > >>network. So I am not sure it is a good idea to remove it. > > > > > >The ECOFF support necessary for that is handled via either conversion > >of ELF binaries (with elf2ecoff), or via wrapping ELF in a fake ECOFF > >(used by delo/t-rex), or by actually compiling an ECOFF bootloader > >(this is arcload and arcboot). > > > >The ELF support in binutils was left in for the latter, and on the > >theory that someone might want to use objcopy for ECOFF conversion. > > > > So basically you mean removing ECOFF support in binutils is not a > problem. Right?
As I tried to explain, it will break arcload and arcboot, and probably some more bootloader-ish things of older machines I don't know of. For Debian, I'd like to have some workaround for arcboot before we kill ECOFF. For binutils upstream, I don't want to kill it without previous discussion on the binutils list. Thiemo
