@justine

By the way:

You're looking for some blatant error from objdump. The point of those flags is to make it attempt to read all of the elements of the ELF file structure, using their recorded lengths, not to actually analyse them in detail.

The boot loader is reading just a block of bytes, so you're looking for a failure where objdump gets an error likewise trying to read an entire ELF section from file, not in the details of what it dumps out interpreting the contents of those sections.

There are ways in which you doing objdump from within a booted operating system is going to cut out some possible root causes for the error. You won't be relying upon the firmware's I/O services, for starters. But it's mystifying how one could get errno 255 via that route, and it seems unlikely that's your problem because you say that it's only changing the kernel that makes the difference on the machine.

#OpenBSD #boot #ELF #objdump