There is no doubt that some parsing has to happen. It is highly unlikely that any arbitrary ELF will be optimized for coreboot.
I'm not sure everyone agrees with that statement yet.
Not every ELF file *can* work at all, even -- an ELF executable states the address it wants to run at, let's hope there is some free memory there!
It's usually 3 segments per ELF, right?
The usual case is one or two segments: either one RWX, or one RX and one RW.
Every payload executable in LAR should be *one* file in LAR. Mixing details of the binary format into the archiver is ludicrous. Whether to use ELF or not is a separate issue.
Segher