Re: [ECOS] Conversion of exeutable a.out to elf format

[Bart Veer <bartv at redhat dot com>]

>>>>> "Pragya" == Pragya Gupta <pragya_g@hotmail.com> writes:

    Pragya>     I am installing ecos1.3.1 over windowsNT 4.0. My
    Pragya> target is arm processor.For debugging purpose, i wish to
    Pragya> use the debugger provided with the armulator . This
    Pragya> debugger excepts the file in elf format ( with the
    Pragya> extension .axf ) . But when i build a file using
    Pragya> arm-elf-gcc, i get an executable 'a.out' which the
    Pragya> debugger is not excepting. Is there any conversion utility
    Pragya> to convert any executable from one format to other ( to
    Pragya> elf format in this case)?

If you have built a GNU elf toolchain then it will produce elf
executables. The name a.out for the default executable is used purely
for historical reasons and does not say anything about the file
format.

In this case I suspect that there is a bug somewhere in the armulator
or in the GNU toolchain. It is possible that the GNU toolchain has
produced a perfectly valid elf executable but, due to a bug, the
armulator cannot handle the file - after all the armulator will have
been tested primarily using the ARM tools. It is also possible that
the GNU toolchain is producing an invalid elf executable, but gdb can
still cope with it. Needless to say, the GNU tools are tested
primarily against each other rather than against proprietary third
party tools. Or there could be bugs on both sides.

Possibly renaming the executable file so that it has a .axf suffix
might be sufficient, although it would be rather sad if the suffix was
that significant.

I suggest searching for some ARM mailing list archives etc. and see if
there are any known interoperability issues when using GNU and ARM
tools. You may also want to look through the gdb and binutils
mailing list archives, accessible from http://sourceware.cygnus.com/

Bart Veer // eCos net maintainer