Hi Gregor, Adrian I don't know if this is helpful, but Ubuntu Launchpad has a ppa package for elftoaout which has been built recently.
https://launchpad.net/~likemartinma/+archive/ubuntu/elftoaout Cheers -- Rick On August 10, 2018 8:12:47 PM ADT, Gregor Riepl <onit...@gmail.com> wrote: >>>> We could modify sparc-utils maybe that it builds on the release >>>> architectures similar to what the hppa porters do with their palo >package. >>> >>> I'll have a look. It doesn't look like this package would only >build/work on >>> sparc. Usefulness is a different matter - but that's probably >outside the >>> scope of acceptance criteria? >> >> Correct. Usefulness doesn't matter. Maybe there is another package or >> upstream project that offers an elftoaout tool? > >So for now, I manually modified the boot image build step to strip with >objcopy first, then convert with elftoaout from sparc-utils. > >The resulting boot.img is identical to the one installed by >grub-ieee1275-bin_2.02+dfsg1-4 - that looks promising! >This means we have at least a method to build the boot code without >a.out >support in objcopy. I also looked into making OpenBoot run the ELF >binary >directly, but that seems impossible for an unexpected reason: boot.img >is >written directly into the boot sector of the /boot partition, and there >is >simply not enough space to accommodate the ELF binary. It's 816 bytes, >while >the a.out is exactly 512. > >I'll discuss integrating the change with the grub2 package maintainer >and >upstream, if that's ok for you. And I'll take a look at the sparc-utils >package, maybe making it build for any instead of just sparc64 (as >discussed). -- Sorry for being brief. Alternate email is rickleir at yahoo dot com
