Broadcom MIPS kernel bit-rot

[Bruce M Simpson]

It appears that the build for Broadcom MIPS kernels has bit-rotted.

I am able to build a kernel with SENTRY5 config, however it will no 
longer boot on the WGT634U.

The root cause appears to be a change in the ld behaviour. For whatever 
reason, the linker will now produce an ELF kernel which has offsets 
pointing backwards in the file, even though it didn't before, and 
"makeoptions LDSCRIPT_NAME" is being used to coax it to use the config 
which used to work for CFE.

CFE, of course, is unable to load ELF kernels via TFTP, unless their 
program headers appear in the order in which they are actually accessed. 
This is purely a limitation of how CFE implements TFTP ELF load.

Looking in the Perforce history I can't see anything which could 
obviously have broken this, it is clear however that ld is now behaving 
very differently.

Questions:
Has the version of ld/binutils in FreeBSD changed in -CURRENT since the 
MIPS code was imported to the main tree?

That's all I can really think of at the moment, not much I can try here. 
U-Boot isn't on the Sentry5.

cheers
BMS