Compilation/Link question

["Belden, Alvin (MED US)" <alvin dot belden at siemens dot com>]

This is not an issue with binutils as such but more of a question.

- The current version of our server applications compiles, links and is
deployed on Linux Enterprise Server release 3 running on a Pentium 6
(i686) chip using gcc 3.2.3 20030502 and ld 2.14.90.0.4 20030523. We
link against several 3rd party libraries as well. We want to port to
Linux AS 4 running on an Itanium chip. 

- I recompile our code successfully but when I try to link against our
3rd party libraries I get the following warnings though the shared
library output is created:

/usr/bin/ld: warning: i386 architecture of input file
`/usr/viking380/libvfm.a(<object file name>)' is incompatible with
ia64-elf64 output

- I have tried using the -format and --oformat switches for ld to try to
get a clean link but to no avail.

- The 3rd party libraries have not been built on an Itanium box.

I know that g++ has the capability to cross-compile for multiple chip
architectures, however this has not been done for the libraries in
question. If I run objdump -a on one of the object files, the output is:


objdump: <object file name>: File format is ambiguous
objdump: Matching formats: elf32-i386-freebsd elf32-i386

The long and short of this is that I cannot compile for one chip
architecture and expect to link on a platform using a different chip
architecture, regardless of any ld tweaks I might attempt. Is this
correct? It seems obvious but I need to be sure I am not missing
something obvious.

Appreciate any help.

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