forgot to mention: verified (from host x86-linux) that things still work "as fine as they did before" 8-) on mips-elf, mips64-elf, mipsisa64-elf, mipsisa32-elf, mipsel-elf, and with hand-tested compile that no crt0 is being linked and that -mno-crt0 doesn't cause a warning or error (sanity). cgd