[Nasm-devel] RDOFF users?

[hpa at zytor.com]

On July 30, 2020 11:29:12 PM PDT, John Keubler <johnkeubler4 at gmail.com> wrote:
>I would be willing to maintain and fix rdf output but it may be over
>my head.  Maybe it may be better to work on a omf linker that does the
>same thing along with the same set of seperate programs for managing
>the file format.
>
>On 7/31/20, John Keubler <johnkeubler4 at gmail.com> wrote:
>> I have used it for building my own operating system on Windows 10 not
>> Linux.  Maybe we could replace it with another kind of linker.  It
>was
>> kind of nice not having to use a cross linker from another project to
>> build my operating system.
>>
>> On 7/30/20, H. Peter Anvin <hpa at zytor.com> wrote:
>>> Hi,
>>>
>>> It seems RDOFF output has been broken since at least the early 2.14
>>> series.  Fixing it without just papering over the problem will
>require
>>> some significant effort, due to a lot of bad assumptions in the
>RDOFF
>>> backend.
>>>
>>> Furthermore, the RDOFF format is really very limited. As such, I'm
>>> strongly inclined to kill it off, and remove both the (broken,
>asserts
>>> on invocation) RDOFF backend as well as the RDOFF tools from NASM.
>>>
>>> I would like to know if there are anyone out there who is actually
>using
>>> them, and/or if anyone would be willing to maintain the RDOFF
>backend
>>> and tools -- they have always been more of a nuisance than anything
>to
>>> me.
>>>
>>> 	-hpa
>>>
>>

An OMF toolchain would definitely be interesting. I will also point you to the work that has been done on ELF.

I just don't have the time to deal with this set of tools that appear to have very few if any users, with a backend that depends on legacy implementation internals that we need to move away from.

In rooting through this I also realized that it has some pretty severe limitations built in, e.g. 64 sections and 32K external symbols. Only one section can be a BSS section, and it is hard-coded in the format to be section 2.

This may sound like a lot, but ELF had to be extended because it had a limit of 65,279 sections... this was insufficient.





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