In message <000367b08ed6c99a_mailit@pop.digitalcommute.com> "Michael 'Maki' Kato" writes:
:   What is the reason for booting elf instead of using elf2ecoff and booting 
: ecoff.  (debugging maybe?)

The ARC bootblocks don't grok ELF.  Further, even though they are
supposed to support reading the raw disk, most have so many bugs in
this as to make it useless.  So we just boot the kernel in ecoff
format and hope for the best.  If the bios actually supported raw disk
reads in a reliable way, elf2coff would be used only for bootblocks.

Warner