Rtems on a Force Sparc 1e target = problems with ELF

[Ivan Galkin]

Greetings,

I am trying to make Rtems run on a Force CPU1e, which is an old Sparc v7 
board in VME format.
I ran into a problem, please help.

I installed Rtems for erc32 sparc target on a linux box and selected 
elf32nfp flavor.
I built a one-line exit(0) program, which is now 1 MB file in erc32-elf 
format.
This Force CPU1e loads it over the ethernet and then claims that the 
boot image does not look like an executable.
I tried other boot images to conclude that the only format that this 
Force 1e can load without hiccups is "a.out-sunos-big".

There are two things that I am trying to do, both unsuccessfully:

1. Create an a.out-sunos-big boot image.
1a. I tried sparc-rtems-objcopy to convert my erc32-elf file to 
a.out-sunos-big and it does not recognize a few sections in the ELF 
file, starting with .jcr. The resulting file is 97k, no good.
1b. I tried to put --oformat=a.out-sunos-big in elf32nfp.cfg. This 
option is ignored, the contents are still in ELF. It looks like all 
rtems libraries are in ELF format. It does not look possible to rebuild 
the libraries in a.out format.

2. I am looking for an ELF loader for sparc. I tried NetBSD Sparc 
NetBoot, it starts up on the target platform, but then it requests 
/tftpboot/vmunix instead of "hello", then it cannot find some NFS share 
and eventually dies.

Questions:
    is there a way of building "a.out-sunos-big" target?
    is there an ELF boot code for sparc v7 that you are familiar with?

many thanks for your inputs
Ivan