While trying to build grub on a Core 2 Duo system that has i386 Fedora installed on it I was stopped at ./configure time due to failing the following check: dnl Some versions of `objcopy -O binary' vary their output depending dnl on the link address. AC_DEFUN([grub_PROG_OBJCOPY_ABSOLUTE], [AC_MSG_CHECKING([whether ${OBJCOPY} works for absolute addresses]) AC_CACHE_VAL(grub_cv_prog_objcopy_absolute, [cat > conftest.c <<\EOF void cmain (void) { *((int *) 0x1000) = 2; } EOF if AC_TRY_EVAL(ac_compile) && test -s conftest.o; then : else AC_MSG_ERROR([${CC-cc} cannot compile C source code]) fi grub_cv_prog_objcopy_absolute=yes for link_addr in 2000 8000 7C00; do if AC_TRY_COMMAND([${CC-cc} ${CFLAGS} -nostdlib -Wl,-N -Wl,-Ttext -Wl,$link_addr conftest.o -o conftest.exec]); then : else AC_MSG_ERROR([${CC-cc} cannot link at address $link_addr]) fi if AC_TRY_COMMAND([${OBJCOPY-objcopy} -O binary conftest.exec conftest]); then : else AC_MSG_ERROR([${OBJCOPY-objcopy} cannot create binary files]) fi if test ! -f conftest.old || AC_TRY_COMMAND([cmp -s conftest.old conftest]); then mv -f conftest conftest.old else ## ./configure fails out here grub_cv_prog_objcopy_absolute=no break fi done rm -f conftest*]) AC_MSG_RESULT([$grub_cv_prog_objcopy_absolute])]) This test initially failed with Fedora's 2.17 based objcopy rpm, but I also was able to get the same behavior from an unpatched copy of binutils-2.18.50.tar.gz. I tried building grub on a Pentium 4 system with i386 Fedora and that worked just fine. I also was able to successfully build on my Core 2 Duo system with the x86_64 version of RHEL 5.1.
The grub test is bogus. This is not a bug in objcopy. Please complain to the grub authors.
This is a dup of PR 5059.