Mail Archives: djgpp/1997/05/08/10:22:50
On Thu, 8 May 1997, Chris Matrakidis wrote:
> > Why not to chose ELF instead of PE? PE is a modification of COFF and a not
> > partiularily good one. ELF OTOH is well designed bottom-up and supported by
> > equally large number of utilities.
>
> The switch from coff to PE is a relatively small one.
> The way I understand it, ELF support needs a lot more work.
Hmm... PE is also COFF, that's true, but ELF support should not be that hard
to achieve in DJGPP. The GCC compiler under Linux uses two targets - a.out and
ELF. All this is achieved through the BFD library which allows you to output
any of its supported formats using the same set of functions. Sure, there are
things specific for each of them, but 90% is the same. ELF support, IMHO,
would require *less* work than PE. For PE we'd have to write code to output M$
COFF format, a linker for it and a loader. Besides I'm not sure whether it
would be supported by FSF - the change would touch DJGPP only and since it is
based on Unix gcc, it should follow its development - adding anything specific
for DJGPP to gcc may mean a need to re-implement it with every gcc change.
With ELF we'd only have to add a new target to DJGPP and write a loader.
Adding new target is just a matter of enabling the new format support in BFD
and recompiling the compiler. Examples of how to do that can be taken from the
Linux port of GCC.
>
> However, if you want to run ELF executables under msdos,
> http://www.planet.net/pjoshv/cross-elf.html may be useful.
I've taken a look at it and, yes, it looks great. But yet it is not a standard
and I'd really love to see ELF support in DJGPP
P.S. I took liberty to cross-post this message to c.o.m.d as I think it may
interest many users of DJGPP.
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