On Fri, Nov 16, 2007 at 11:58:14PM +0100, Christian Franke wrote: > Building GRUB modules requires ELF support in gas and ld. For platforms > where ELF is not the native format, ld may support ELF output. If not > (like on Cywin) some conversion to ELF is necessary. > > In general, GNU objcopy allows conversion between object file formats. > Unfortunately, objcopy (and BFD itself) does not include any support for > the conversion of relocation formats (even conversion between ELF > variants do not work). In particular, when converting PE (a COFF > variant) to ELF, objcopy does not abort but silently produces bad > PC-relative relocation offsets. In my first Cygwin patch, there is a > hack to fix this in the GRUB ELF loader. > > For specific conversions, fixing this in objcopy itself is easy. But > there is not much chance that such pragmatic patches will be accepted > upstream. > (http://sourceware.org/ml/binutils/2007-10/threads.html#00302) > > I have prepared a reduced (~680 LoC) version of objcopy with the PE->ELF > fix added. To support build on non-ELF platforms, I would suggest to add > this to the GRUB codebase. It can be later extended for other platforms > if desired.
I'm not sure what the GRUB maintainers will think, but I'm not very inclined to duplicate stuff that binutils already have. How about building binutils with --enable-targets=i386-elf ? Maybe the Cygwin maintainers would even add it as default. We could also have a configure check that aborts build when -m elf_i386 is not supported (which may also be a problem on pure-x86_64 environment!) and prompt user to rebuild binutils. -- Robert Millan <GPLv2> I know my rights; I want my phone call! <DRM> What use is a phone call, if you are unable to speak? (as seen on /.) _______________________________________________ Grub-devel mailing list Grub-devel@gnu.org http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/grub-devel
