Re: [gentoo-alt] Patch breaks

[Markus Duft]

On 08/26/2010 08:42 AM, Christopher Warrington wrote:
> "Al" <oss.elmar@××××××××××.com> @ 2010-8-25 3:25 AM:
>> Yes, Cygwin is not ELF but COFF.
>
> I've almost always heard Windows executables called Portable Executables
> (PEs) [1]. Though, according to the article, PEs are an evolution of COFFs.

Windows uses (that's the _real_ name ;)) PE/COFF. this means, PE
(personal executable) is the "container" (dll, exe), but the objects are
COFF (common object file format).

>
> Looking at a Cygwin binary (/usr/sbin/httpd2.exe from [2]), I do see the the
> PE magic number [3], 0x4D 0x5A ("MZ"), not what appears to be the COFF magic
> numbers [4], 0x4C 0x01.

yeah, right, but the objects that make up the binary all had the COFF
magic. the linker then puts those together and outputs a PE binary,
containing all the sections from each COFF object.

markus

>
> [1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portable_Executable>
> [2]
> <http://cygwin.iphoneapps4free.org/release/apache2/apache2-2.2.6-1.tar.bz2>
> [3] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_number_(programming)>
> [4] <http://www.delorie.com/djgpp/doc/coff/filhdr.html>
>