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From: adrie@philica.ica.philips.nl (Adrie Koolen)
Newsgroups: comp.os.minix
Subject: Re: Unified MINIX GNU port
Message-ID: <739@philica.ica.philips.nl>
Date: 1 Feb 91 07:04:22 GMT
References: <43079@nigel.ee.udel.edu> <1991Jan29.234455.10126@jarvis.csri.toronto.edu>
Reply-To: adrie@beitel.ica.philips.nl (Adrie Koolen)
Organization: Philips TDS, Innovation Centre Aachen
Lines: 22

In article <1991Jan29.234455.10126@jarvis.csri.toronto.edu> wayne@csri.toronto.edu (Wayne Hayes) writes:
>In article <43079@nigel.ee.udel.edu> HBO043%DJUKFA11.BITNET@cunyvm.cuny.edu (Christoph van Wuellen) writes:
>>My question, would it be tolerable to use the originial GNU a.out format and
>>design a conversion program that converts GNU binaries to MINIX binaries
>
>Sorry to disappoint you, but this has already been done.  I've forgotten
>where I got it, but I have gcc up and running on my Minix-386 box, and
>it produces a non-Minix a.out which is converted to Minix via a program
>called, oddly enough, 'gcc2minix'.  It works fine when you put a nice
>front end shell script onto it that calls gcc and then gcc2minix.

There's a handier way to do this. For Minix-Sparc, the GNU C compiler also
generates an a.out file with a GNU header (which is in fact a SunOS compatible
executable file header). I adopted the compiler dispatcher, gcc.c, to call
a conversion program, cv in my case, to change the header and the symbol
table to the Minix format. You only have to fiddle with link_spec to call
your conversion program at the end. If your interested, I can mail the cdiff
file against gcc.c of 1.37.1, it's some 40 lines. I guess, that other persons,
who ported GNU C to Minix-386 did the same thing, as this the way to do it.

Adrie Koolen (adrie@ica.philips.nl)
Philips Innovation Centre Aachen