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Recent removal of a.out and COFF support for sparc

Phil Blundell pb@pbcl.net
Wed Aug 8 14:02:00 GMT 2018 
On Wed, 2018-08-08 at 15:45 +0200, John Paul Adrian Glaubitz wrote:
> What do you suggest on the other hand? Shall we tell them because upstream
> binutils has dropped AOUT/COFF support, there won't be any bootloaders
> anymore for SPARC machines?

Is there any particular reason that those people wishing to build
bootloaders for machines whose PROMs only understand a.out can't simply
use an old version of binutils to do so?  Or, if the requirement is
simply to take an ELF image and transform it into an a.out image that
the PROM can ingest, they could simply write a small tool of their own
to do the required conversion as a post-processing step.  If I
understand correctly they don't need even the full capabilities of
"objcopy", let alone the rest of the binutils, to solve the problem at
hand.

p.
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