Re: [PATCH] Kernel fixes for Cygwin

[Pavel Roskin]

On Mon, 2008-07-21 at 18:50 +0200, Javier Martín wrote:

> Of course, another way to go could be to allow the bootloader part of
> GRUB to be built in PE format: it would "just" be a matter of writing
> the PE counterparts to kern/elf.c and abstracting kern/dl.c "a
> bit" (i.e. a lot of work). The downside to this, apart from the
> unspecified work required, is that Windows-built i386-pc-pe modules are
> no longer compatible with Linux-built i386-pc-elf. Not a showstopper,
> but might require a sober thinking. As I have a lot of free time right
> now, I'll try to think whether it's possible or not.

I think it's important to have a consistent format for modules.

> > Maybe we could treat ELF header like a multiboot header?  That means
> > that we write the header fields in the assembly language, substitute the
> > necessary variables and ask objcopy to make a raw binary that would
> > actually be an ELF file?
> As far as I understand the ELF format, this would be too complex to get
> right: there's a lot of info in there.

If ELF is too complex to write manually, we can use another format
everywhere.  It could be something GRUB specific.  But I think we should
try to use ELF, as it's widespread and extensible.

-- 
Regards,
Pavel Roskin