Re: [AVaRICE-user] Avarice file formats

[Nils K. S. <ni...@om...>]

On Tue, 1 Apr 2003, E. Weddington wrote:

> On Windows platforms, bfd, by itself, is not casually made to the users. If the
> support is built-in to the avarice executable that would be the best for this
> platform.

Static linking of bfd into the avarice.exe binary is a very good idea
for Windows (in fact it should be considered for every binary release as
the BFD seems not to be part of a standard Unix installation).


Also, please note that my previous patch has flaws on which I am currently
working to fix.   Noteably,

1. When parsing the input file to find useful sections for FLASH, some file
   formats (binary/ihex) have section flags that are kind of useless.
   My new approach is to look at the section address in stead (which is just as
   safe).
   This causes ihex format to be unsupported  by previous (broken) patch.

2. Multiple sections that overlap on a FLASH-page basis are not supported.
   My new approach is to build a complete FLASH image before transferring to
   the device.  This is much safer, and supports advanced linkerscripts with
   multiple sections.  (typically bootloaders and other data which must be
   relocated to known addresses).

3. ELF file format with one section (e.g. .text) starting at address 0 should
   IMHO work correctly with the previous patch.

Regards,
Nils Strom
E-mail:  ni...@om...
Web:     http://www.omegav.ntnu.no/~nilsst

Hardware, n: The part of a computer system that can be kicked
             (Michael Barr)