Re: Xbox support question

["Aaron W. LaFramboise" <aaron98wiridge9 at aaronwl dot com>]

Myria wrote:

> Currently, we need a patch either way, as --subsystem:xbox isn't allowed, 
> and ld doesn't accept numbers either (--subsystem:14).  It's just rather 
> dangerous to leave EXEs floating around that executing could do who knows 
> what to Windows.  Setting subsystem 14 causes an error when trying to run 
> one.

I would suspect a patch to accept 'xbox' (and any other missing
subsystem) would be welcome, as well as perhaps a patch to allow the
subsystem parameter to accept arbitrary integers.

>>Is it a lot of work to cause binutils to be able to handle XBE directly?
>>Is XBE similar to any of the other object formats binutils uses?
> 
> For someone that understands ld, probably not.  But I don't, and XBE stuff 
> is a little weird, with a million options.
> 
> XBE is most like PE, as you probably guessed.  However, to correctly 
> implement XBE requires the SHA-1 hash algorithm, which is a significant 
> addition.

There are a lot of SHA-1 implementations availible, but I don't know if
there are any that are completely public domain or have been assigned to
the FSF.  A dependency could on a free third-party library could be
established for the Xbox if the politics were ultimately prohibitive.
The real work would probably be in tweaking PECOFF for XBE, but if its
fairly close, that might not be that big of a deal.

Aaron W. LaFramboise