> I tried to compile emacs and got an error telling me I can not do this due
> to my use of the mips chip.

> What is the story here?

This is (at least partly) my fault.  Part of the Emacs build procedure is
to load a bunch of elisp code into memory and then rewrite an executable
copy of itself with the code preloaded.  unexec() does this, but there is
no working unexec() for NetBSD/pmax.

I took on the task of making it work lo these many moons ago, but was not
successful.  My version would work on small, simple executables, but kept
losing on Emacs itself (the only test case I was really interested in).
Documentation is, AFAIK, non-existent, and lots of attempts to hallucinate
what might be wrong were unfruitful.

As a side effect, I have an excruciatingly-commented version of unexec()
that sort-of works (except for the global offset table stuff; I never really
twigged to what that was doing, and that may ultimately have been my prob-
lem).  If somebody wants this, you have but to holler.

It would have been nice if the guy who did ld(1) would have written
unexec() - he's *gotta* know how to make it work.

Send flames about my feeble-mindedness to:

Terry R. Friedrichsen

terry@venus.sunquest.com