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I am trying to link object files which had originally been created by two different assemblers. We have some legacy assembly code that was compiled into object files using an old MRI assembler for the 68332 processor. We are developing a new application with the GNU Binutils m68k v2.24. We would like to use the original object files as built by the old assembler without change. I have configured our build environment to do this. For historic reasons, our build environment links into three output formats: Srecord, ieee, and ELF. When I run this is succeeding without error for the Srecord and ieee formats. However, for the ELF output format, I receive the following errors:

m68k-elf-ld: failed to merge target specific data of file

As a result the Elf file is not created.

I am first trying to understand what this error message might mean but I was not able to. If anyone knows the GNU Binutils ld documentation enough to point me to where the error definition is defined I would appreciate this.

I have actually loaded our target and run the Srecord output. It seems to pass many tests the same as before so it appears that it is running to some degree.

It looks like our legacy object files may be in coff format format. I would guess that this is the problem. Is there any way to convert a coff file to ELF format?

Thanks in advance for any support.

Michael Bauer
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1 Answers1

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It looks like our legacy object files may be in coff format format. I would guess that this is the problem. Is there any way to convert a coff file to ELF format?

objcopy can be used to convert between formats. However, to do this it has to have been configured to understand both formats. You can check what formats it accepts with objcopy --info (a shortened list appears at the end of objcopy --help).

If you objcopy doesn't support the required formats, then you'll have to build binutils yourself.

Tom Tromey
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  • Thank you for your response. I was trying to convert formats using objcopy but apparently didn't have the name just right. I was trying ELF when the correct format was elf32-m68k. For others, I ended up using objdump with the -f option to print the full format from my legacy files. Thank you for the help. – Michael Bauer Dec 04 '16 at 04:34