>> I guess that NetBSD/mips have not used native ecoff binaries
>> in its history (NetBSD/alpha did, BTW)

I beleive the first kernel I bootstrapped was runinng ECOFF binaries,
but compiled wiht the Ultirx 4.a  mips cc. That aside, I think we went
from 4.4bsd-style a.out binaries to ELF.

>Doing the same
>for NetBSD would make it impossible to execute either NetBSD
>or Ultrix ecoff binaries, since the first matching execsw entry
>is used for binary.

This begs the question, *why* suport ecoff binaries?  We can't do
ECOFF/mips shared-libs, as there's no standard for ECOFF shared-libs
on MIPs and (last I looked) no support for it in the GNU
toolchain. ECOFF on mips has been obsolete in Unix-style systems
since IRIX 4.0.5 was supplanted by IRIX 5.

Supporting other little-endian ECOFF mips systems may sound sensible,
but the only one I can think of is NT. "nuff said.

Ted Lemon and I made a concerted effort to get rid of ECOFF on pmax;
Simon Burge mostly finished it (the only vesitges are for network
booting on old PROms). It seemed to all of us that getting rid of
ECOFF on mips was a worthy goal.  

Now, perhaps there are reasons to try and support native ECOFF; but
could someone explain what they are?  Or, if that's not the goal, what
is?