It was quite educational to completely rebuild an i386 system during the a.out to ELF transition. Definitely a worthwhile exercise to learn all the autotools m

It was quite educational to completely rebuild an i386 system during the a.out to ELF transition. Definitely a worthwhile exercise to learn all the autotools madness that underlies most of the Linux toolchain, but far easier than bootstrapping from nothing. During both ia64 and amd64 bring up we were lucky enough to have emulators that allowed running new 64 bit binaries on existing 32 bit machines. qemu fills that niche today, making life easier for anyone that wants to build an entirely new architecture from scratch. Standing on the shoulders of giants...