traditional Intel & Microsoft formats...

[artk@congruent.com (Arthur Kreitman)]

>   Specs for some of the formats you are interested in *are* available
>   and don't have to be reverse-engineered.  (Some other info, such as
>   debug sections, may require more work -- I haven't checked into all the
>   details.)  There's an organization of OS and tool companies called the
  As far as what Microsoft is calling their PE format (the one that's being
used for NT and will be used for Windows95, none of those documents you
listed are either complete or valid.

>   Tool Interface Standards committee.  It publishes specs and talks
>   about new formats and revisions.  Cygnus asked how we could join one
>   time, but never got a response.  Here are my old notes about this:
  I think the reason you never got a response it that the effort was
stillborn.  It was announced about the same time as NT was announced.
They advertised that DWARF was the answer to all your problems, and ignored
Microsoft.  They then disappeared.  I don't know if they exist or not,
but I'm certain that Microsoft has continued to enhance aspects of
their object format without asking their permission.


>   By the way, it looks to me like Windows DLL linking is remarkably like
>   dynamic linking on SVR4 or SunOS.  Since the GNU Linker now supports
>   dynamic linking (which was, indeed, a fair bit of work), making it
>   handle DLL's is probably not as big a job as you think.

   I don't think that the mechanism used to support dll's is similar
to sunos shared library support in any way.  Their capabilities
differ significantly.  

>   The way to support any of these formats is to write a new BFD
>   back-end.  It's really pretty easy.  Look at one of the simple ones
  That's the easiest part of supporting the Microsoft formats.  There are
new section types that have to be generated, import tables, export tables,
resources.  BFD get you alot closer, but I would guess that it will
that more resources to get the current BFD to completely support MS
executables then it took to add sunos dynamic linking.

   As an aside, do you know how much work was required to add 
sun dymanic linking.