On Fri, 27 Oct 2000, Chris wrote:

> Highlights/lowlights for Beige G3 Rev.1:    [not guaranteed to be accurate,
>                                             but the best I have ATM]
> 
>     - TFTP/bootp booting works from an i386 server provided one sets a
> static ARP entry for the boot machine and has bootptab setup properly (can
> provide a bootptab) Caveat: ofwboot.xcf freezes the whole machine as soon as
> it loads because it's compiled at the wrong address from what I'm told. The
> only other possibility is that I'm using the wrong syntax. Shouldn't booting
> ofwboot.xcf with no command line options bring up a prompt on where to load
> the kernel? It never gets that far. I just do boot enet at OFW, what other
> options should I have? Haven't tried TFTP booting a full {E/X}COFF Kernel,
> do we even have the facilities to convert ELF => {E/X}COFF like pmax does?
> Post me one somewhere and I'll try it...

Try boot enet -a (as someone else suggested).

We have the ability to kinda convert from ELF to XCOFF, though it is not
as simple as the pmax ELF -> ECOFF converter.

Check out the makefile for ofwboot, and look at the parts for making
ofwboot.xcf. What we do is make a special version of ofwboot.elf, which we
call ofwboot.mrg. It is still an ELF file, but 1) it has an extra object
file in it - at the begining of the text segment - , Xcoffextra.o, which
contains the address of the start symbol (yes it realy is just 4 bytes of
text segment), 2) Its entry point is the "entry" symbol, which is in the
Xcoffextra.o file, and 3) it was linked with a special linker script. This
script reduces the number of segments in the file from a lot to just text,
data, and bss.

We then use objcopy to strip some things off and to make the result an
xcoff file.