Striking gold in binutils

" Digging the commands out of the makefile by hand is madness."  
  
You bet, but IF you would do such a thing, you would understand that on a  
64-bit platform we are actually booting a 32bit binary :  
  
ld -m elf_i386  -Ttext 0x100000 |\  
        -e startup_32 -m elf_i386 |\  
        arch/x86_64/boot/compressed/head.o |\  
        arch/x86_64/boot/compressed/misc.o |\  
        arch/x86_64/boot/compressed/piggy.o |\  
        -o arch/x86_64/boot/compressed/vmlinux  
  
Apparently we are actually booting a 32bit binary on our x86_64 platform.  
But that doesn't matter as long as we call our real kernel piggy.o :  
  
ld -m elf_i386  -r --format binary --oformat elf32-i386 |\  
        -T arch/x86_64/boot/compressed/vmlinux.scr |\  
        arch/x86_64/boot/compressed/vmlinux.bin.gz |\  
        -o arch/x86_64/boot/compressed/piggy.o  
  
where vmlinux.bin.gz is created by the following command :  
  
gzip -f -9 < arch/x86_64/boot/compressed/vmlinux.bin > |\  
        arch/x86_64/boot/compressed/vmlinux.bin.gz  
  
where vmlinux.bin is created by running a custom tool called objcopy :  
  
objcopy -O binary -R .note -R .comment -S  vmlinux |\  
         arch/x86_64/boot/compressed/vmlinux.bin  
  
where finally vmlinux is that ELF 64-bit LSB executable :  
  
ld -m elf_x86_64 -e stext -T arch/x86_64/kernel/vmlinux.lds.s |\  
     arch/x86_64/kernel/head.o arch/x86_64/kernel/head64.o |\  
     arch/x86_64/kernel/init_task.o   init/built-in.o |\  
     --start-group  usr/built-in.o  arch/x86_64/kernel/built-in.o |\  
     arch/x86_64/mm/built-in.o  arch/x86_64/ia32/built-in.o |\  
     kernel/built-in.o  mm/built-in.o  fs/built-in.o  ipc/built-in.o |\  
     security/built-in.o  crypto/built-in.o  lib/lib.a |\  
     arch/x86_64/lib/lib.a  lib/built-in.o  arch/x86_64/lib/built-in.o |\  
     drivers/built-in.o  sound/built-in.o  arch/x86_64/pci/built-in.o |\  
     net/built-in.o --end-group .tmp_kallsyms2.o -o vmlinux  
  
   -rwxr-xr-x  1 root root 7478601 Nov 21 14:48 vmlinux  
  
   vmlinux: ELF 64-bit LSB executable, AMD x86-64, version 1 (SYSV),  
            statically linked, not stripped  
  
Cheers,  
  
Robert  
--   
Robert M. Stockmann - RHCE  
Network Engineer - UNIX/Linux Specialist  
crashrecovery.org  stock@stokkie.net