Byte-swapping S-record output in objcopy?

[Nigel Stephens]

Zack Weinberg wrote:

>One of CodeSourcery's customers has asked us for ideas about how to
>handle a fairly peculiar situation, to wit:  There are ARM embedded
>systems where the initial boot (from ROM) is in big-endian mode, but
>after everything comes up the operating system runs in little-endian
>mode.  To handle this properly, the ROM image needs to be generated
>little-endian and then byte-swapped before the ROM is burnt.  
>
>The image is compiled to ELF, the ROM burner takes S-records, so one
>obvious approach is to add a byte-swapping mode to objcopy -O srec.  I
>was wondering, first, whether there is already a way to do something
>like that, and second, if there isn't, whether a patch to add such a
>feature would be accepted.
>  
>

But how big is the word that you're going to swap - 16, 32  or 64 bits? 
Maybe --interleave could be reused for that purpose. But a more flexible 
approach might be an argument which explicitly listed the order in which 
bytes should be output, for example:

    --select-bytes=0,1,2,3		normal byte order
    --select-bytes=3,2,1,0		byte swap 32-bit word
    --select-bytes=7,6,5,4,3,2,1,0	byte swap 64-bit word
    --select-bytes=1,0			byte swap 16-bit words
    --select-bytes=2,3,0,1		halfword swap 32-bit word

etc.

Nigel