[ros-dev] Endianess

[Tristan Miller]

>Sorry for waiting until now to reply.
It's all good.  : )

>What do you think?
I think we should convert to BE, but not away from PE-COFF.  There are too
many differences between them, and while it would be less work in the short
term to switch to ELF, in the long term, implementing all of the features of
PE would be very troublesome.  Not the least concern is that information
such as import data and file headers aren't even mapped into a process's
address space with ELF.  As I understand it, when you get an IHANDLE to a
linked in DLL it's just a pointer to the mapped in PE file header.  I'm sure
there are programs that require this on a source level to run (which, for
quite some time will be the only thing that affects us on the PowerPC side
of things).

That being said, a proper pe-powerpcbe target in gcc should then be the
first priority.  Binutils already more or less properly creates pe-powercbe
files (with what I assume are your patches on the wiki, and a little
monkeying to make sure that the MZ header and PE signature are always
written as little-endian regardless of the target architecture).  What kind
of issues had you had on the EABI side of things, and what was your plan in
more detail for emulating the features of PE in ELF?

Also how much progress had you made in the port up to now?

   ~Tristan Miller
     (monocasa)
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