Building gas/ld to default to old-school A.OUT format

Ian Lance Taylor ian@wasabisystems.com
Tue Aug 10 21:49:00 GMT 2004


"David D. Hagood" <David.Hagood@aeroflex.com> writes:

> On 08/10/2004 03:37 PM, Ian Lance Taylor wrote:
> > I would recommend trying an old version of the binutils.  Take a look
> > at ftp://sourceware.org/pub/binutils/old-releases.  Maybe something in
> > the 2.7 timeframe or thereabouts, but you'll have to see.
> > a.out is barely supported these days.
> 
> Nope. For whatever reason, any time I tell it to generate a.out, I get
> the Linux format, not the actual old-school OMAGIC format.

If you configure for i386-vxworks, you will get something which works
on VxWorks.  At least for some version of the binutils and some
version of VxWorks.

In any case, I don't know of any differences between the Linux a.out
format and the traditional i386 a.out format, except in the area of
shared libraries which are not relevant here.  The toolchain will
generate ZMAGIC executables by default, but that was always the
default, and shouldn't really matter because for VxWorks you always
have to link with -r anyhow.  If you really want OMAGIC binaries, use
-N or --omagic, as documented in the linker manual.

Ian



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