OSLib and ELF

[Tom Hughes]

In message <gemini.jcwcsn03aljpc06g6.tony at vanderhoff.org>
          Tony van der Hoff <tony at vanderhoff.org> wrote:

> On 3 Feb at 16:32 "David J. Ruck" <druck at druck.org.uk> wrote in message
> <2cbf71af4e.druck at druck.freeuk.net>
> 
> > How much work would it be to generate an ELF version of OSLib as well as
> > an ALF?
> > 
> > GCC 4.1.1 is on its way with support for the ELF toolchain, and Firefox2
> > has already been built against it. To be useful in a wider context native
> > SWI support via OSLib is pretty essential.
>
> I've really no idea, Dave, as I don't know the ELF format. I guess I need to
> read up on precisely how different it is from ALF, and then make the
> necessary changes to the build scripts. I suspect the former is the most
> daunting, as I don't really know where to start.

It should just be a question of using an assembler that supports ELF and
giving it the right options to produce an ELF object file instead of an AOF
object file.

> Learning ELF would probably be a useful project for me; does anyone have any
> good links to its omplementayion, other than the rather heavy-going TIS
> document? Google throws up some intriguing, though not entirely appropriate,
> links :(

You don't really need to know ELF to support it, anymore that you need
to know the details of the AOF format to build AOF object files.

I assume that the ELF toolchain is still using ALF files for static
libraries, but just with ELF objects inside Dave?

Of course we might also want to link a shared OSLib but that just
means using a linker that supports ELF and asking it to link all
the ELF object files from the assembler together into an ELF shared
object.

Tom

-- 
Tom Hughes (tom at compton.nu)
http://www.compton.nu/