Re: IA64 port

[Tristan Gingold]

On Tue, Jan 29, 2008 at 03:46:50PM +0100, Marco Gerards wrote:
> Robert suggested some changes.  I also noticed in the discussion that
> you didn't follow common practise (like an existing grub-mkimage
> implementation).  Personally, as maintainer, I am against maintaining
> two different approaches of the same problem.  It costs us time to
> maintain this and both case have separate bugs.  So I rather see the
> code shared, one way or the other.  To safe time, it might save you
> some work if you initiate a discussion about this.

The facts:

util/i386/efi/grub-mkimage.c and elf2pe.c do almost the same thing: converting
an ELF file to a PE file.  But:

* the input format is slightly different (Elf32 vs Elf64)
* the output format is slightly different (PE vs PE+)
* the relocating work is different (x86 vs ia64, Rel vs Rela)
* The entry point is a descriptor on ia64
* grub-mkimage.c can insert modules in a section.

I propose to extend grub-mkimage.c so that it can handle ia64.  I propose to
select at compile time which convertion to do through macro (see beginning
of elf2pe file to see an example).  I don't think it is worth making a
generic grub-mkimage binary that can do any convertion: it's too much
code duplication.

Ok for this approach ?

Tristan.