Subject: Re: IRIX ELF docs

From: "Christopher W. Carlson" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 1 Oct 1997 08:56:30 -0700

On Sep 30,  4:42pm, William J. Earl wrote:
> Subject: Re: IRIX ELF docs
> Ralf Baechle writes:
>  > Hi all,
>  >
>  > our current linker is producing IRIX flavored ELF binaries, not MIPS
>  > ABI.  We still seem to have some bugs in the dynamic linker and these
>  > are now pretty close to the top on my to do list.  However I've got
>  > not documentation about the IRIX binary format, so I'm pretty much
>  > relying on reverse engineering for fixing them.  Does anybody have
>  > a pointer to documentation or documentation about IRIX ELF flavoured
>  > o32 bit object file format?
>
>       IRIX ELF O32 (dynamic) object files are MIPS ABI object files.
> There are optional extra sections, to support features such as "quickstart"
> (which allows RLD to skip some of the fixups at startup time), but the
> required parts are as defined by the MIPS ABI.
>-- End of excerpt from William J. Earl

I recently went to the local technical bookstore and found that AT&T
no longer publishes the ABI books (the blue covered books describing
the ELF format).  The bookstore was, thus, unable to even order them
for me.

Does anybody know where to buy these books?

-- 

		Chris Carlson

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---

From: [email-masked] (Ariel Faigon)
Date: Wed, 1 Oct 1997 10:20:38 -0700 (PDT)

Chris wrote:
:
:I recently went to the local technical bookstore and found that AT&T
:no longer publishes the ABI books (the blue covered books describing
:the ELF format).  The bookstore was, thus, unable to even order them
:for me.
:
:Does anybody know where to buy these books?
:

Not specifically on the ABI, but a search for "MIPS" on www.amazon.com
gives only 4 hits, two of which are out-of-print/hard-to-find and
probably irrelevant, and two that on the architecture only:

	Mips R4000 User's Manual
	Joseph Heinrich / Paperback / Published 1993 
	Our Price: $44.00 

	Mips Risc Architecture ~ Ships in 2-3 days
	Gerry Kane, Joe Heinrich / Paperback / Published 1991 
	Our Price: $46.00 
	Read more about this title... 

	Mips-X Risc Microprocessor (Kluwer International Series in
	Engineering and Computer Science) 
	Paul Chow / Hardcover / Published 1989 
	(Publisher Out Of Stock)

	Mips Risc Architecture 
	Published 1991 
	(Hard to Find)

The canonical place to look for MIPS ABI stuff is:
	www.mipsabi.org

The SGI specific quickstart stuff and whatever is not published
on www.mipsabi.org is probably not publicly documented and
I suspect not even documented much beyond the (rld etc.) source itself.
I'll be glad to be proven wrong on this.
-- 
Peace, Ariel

---

From: Ralf Baechle <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 1 Oct 1997 16:28:51 -0700 (PDT)

> I'll be glad to be proven wrong on this.

Apropos quickstart, I recently had a discussion with someone about
quickstart & performance.  Does anybody have hard numbers about how
much the speedup by quickstart is?

  Ralf

---

From: Martin Knoblauch <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 02 Oct 1997 11:38:01 +0200

> much the speedup by quickstart is?
Ralf,

 one of these typical "it depends" questions :-) If your application
has only a short list of DSOs to load and if it runs for hours,
the effect of quickstart is pretty low. If your app loads a
lot of DSOs, which may in turn load other DSOs, the effect on
the startup time maybe pretty big (50%). And if the ratio between
startup-time and real-work-time is in favour of startup, you
better put some effort in quickstarting your DSOs.

 The major problem is, that the more DSOs you have, the more
difficult it is to get all of the quickstarting. So a lot of
people never do the work.

Martin
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