🚀 go-pugleaf

johns@rd.scitec.com.au (John Saunders) writes:

>After seeing the benefits of 4K byte filesystem pages plastered all over
>the place, I decided I wanted more speed. However after playing towers of
>hanoi with the data on my partitions, I finally got 4K byte pages only

Hee. Time to buy a tape drive.  :-)

>to find my a.out programs (abuse, Doom, netscape) don't work anymore. If
>I had a complete a.out system, rather than ELF, I would be stuck up the
>proverbial creek without the proverbial paddle. I hate booting floppies.

>When I run an a.out program, it says something about TEXT_O < PAGESIZE
>and that I need to convert my binary. Has anybody done this before? Should
>I make a 10 Meg filesystem just for a.out programs with 1024 byte blocks?

Ugh. Ugly solution.

>I tried making Doom into an ELF binary but it just coredumps, I didn't
>really think that it would work but ld thought it could.

One solution is to convert the NMAGIC to an OMAGIC binary. I am not sure
if this is what the "Please convert binary." means to do. Perhaps you
can play games with the "-Ttext" flag to ld. Anyway this works, and you
should be able to play doom again on your 4kB ext2fs.

-----------------------------------------------
gromit:/mnt# cp -av /bin/date .
/bin/date -> ./date
gromit:/mnt# ./date
N_TXTOFF < BLOCK_SIZE. Please convert binary.
./date: Exec format error. Wrong Architecture.
gromit:/mnt# ld -s -N ./date -o date-omagic
gromit:/mnt# ./date-omagic
Fri Feb 23 10:39:41 EST 1996
gromit:/mnt# file ./date*
./date:        Linux/i386 demand paged executable
./date-omagic: Linux/i386 executable
gromit:/mnt# ls -l date*
-rwxr-xr-x   1 root     root        25604 Feb 15  1994 date*
-rwx------   1 root     root        24620 Feb 23 10:39 date-omagic*
gromit:/mnt# 
-----------------------------------------------

Paul.