traditional Intel & Microsoft formats...

[Erich Stefan Boleyn <erich@uruk.org>]

Greetings.

I'm curious if there is an intention of any on these lists to
try to be able to (for the i386 processor series):

  1) assemble (GAS) and manipulate (BFD) traditional Intel/Microsoft
     16-bit code (OMF/NE formats).

  2) assemble (GAS) and manipulate (BFD) traditional Intel/Microsoft
     32-bit code (OMF/PE formats).

"assemble" is reasonably obvious, but by "manipulate", I mean support
in the full sense of the BFD library code, so that you could (if
possible) link it via the GNU linker with other object file formats,
etc.

My interest is mostly as targets, not as hosts, and the 16-bit assembly
is less interesting to me (though I saw the message posted about
others being interested in 16-bit assembly).

The goal behind this is that, well, I'd already announced on the
BFD list working on a BFD-based dynamic linker...  well, my long-term
goal would be a flexible binary emulation system using the
BFD to handle format and system-dependent structures and symbols.

The idea would be that the HURD (and Linux, FreeBSD, too if others cared
to port it, though it is easier on the HURD, I think) could then run
MS-Windows 3.1, DOS, NT, and Chicago applications regardless of the
host processor, and at native speeds if you have a processor
with an "Intel 386 emulation mode" in hardware.

Well, all that is far off, but some essential parts are the items
mentioned above.

The BFD already supports the object file formats of other UNIX-like
OS's, so that's mostly work on the side of the emulator piece.

Anyway, I'm tossing this out for those who might be interested/
are thinking about working on such support/might be now...

Thanks for your time.

Erich Boleyn
--
Erich Stefan Boleyn               \__   E-mail (preferred):  <erich@uruk.org>
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