[CDG5] Building OF Client Interface Programs

[Daniel B-J]

> It's interesting that XCOFF in OF isn't relocatable. I remember reading somewhere that earlier Apple OF implementation used to include very primitive loader packages. I was told that this has been fixed in later versions.
> 
> Is that true for any specific OF version or for ALL NW versions?

It's definitely true for the Pismo I do most of my hacking on. Its xcoff-loader package has very simple code. I'm still not sure if the elf-loader is any different. The code is much more complex and I can't follow it well. At least the ELF doesn't actually specify a physical address (according to the manually-layed-out ELF header for the Trampoline in the original cdg5 repo).

> I assume that non-relocatable XCOFF doesn't present a problem in BootX...

The boot code doesn't do anything weird like modify the XCOFF, so they solved that problem. Probably by using 0x00100000 and 0x00200000.

> My bet is that a custom conversion tool similar to macho-to-xcoff in BootX has been used for that purpose.

Probably. I don't really know the format for either XCOFF or ELF.