David Engle is right + Possible gotcha...

[Michael Alan Dorman <mdorman@lot49.med.miami.edu>]

First, David Engle was 100% correct --- we don't necessarily need to patch
the kernel sources to be compilable in elf because you can still compile
the kernel as a.out just by doing: 

PATH=/usr/i486-linuxaout/bin:$PATH make [whatever]

I'm assuming he planned it that way.  If he didn't, he shouldn't admit it. 

Also, people should be warned that before beginning the move to elf in any
meaningful way, they really need to compile elf support into the kernel
(maybe newer kernel packages should come with this by default), rather
than relying on the binfmt_elf module. 

Otherwise one can put oneself in a situation where some portions of the
startup (say, e2fsck) can't run becuase modules haven't loaded yet, and
one ends up in emergency mode where the kernel can't be recompiled because
'make config' can't find /dev/tty. 

Fortunately, creating /fastboot and rebooting got me to the point where I
_could_ recompile the kernel.  That solved all the problems. 

Mike.
--
"I'm a dinosaur.  Somebody's digging my bones."