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From: cgd@eden.CS.Berkeley.EDU (Chris G. Demetriou)
Newsgroups: comp.os.386bsd.bugs
Subject: Re: Catching References to address 0
Date: 14 Jun 93 13:09:22
Organization: Kernel Hackers 'r' Us
Lines: 37
Message-ID: <CGD.93Jun14130922@eden.CS.Berkeley.EDU>
References: <1vid0k$p4n@agate.berkeley.edu>
NNTP-Posting-Host: eden.cs.berkeley.edu
In-reply-to: wjolitz@soda.berkeley.edu's message of 14 Jun 1993 17:37:24 GMT
In article <1vid0k$p4n@agate.berkeley.edu> wjolitz@soda.berkeley.edu (William F. Jolitz) writes:
.There's nothing worse than N different versions of the same stupid
.object file format, straining a.out a little bit more in yet another
.direction. This is as usual short sighted, and only useful as a quick
.hack. BSD suffers from too many of such quick hacks.
on the other hand, it could be argued that the use of
USRTEXT==0 to begin with was short sighted, and that the
new format is a fix for that. (actually, i agree
that the current QMAGIC implementation is a hack;
USRTEXT should be defined the be the appropriate
non-zero value, rather than being zero, and having a
magic constant added to it someplace...)
what NetBSD is doing in the future is
dropping both QMAGIC and old (broken -- it had no a_mid
field on the i386) ZMAGIC, and making that part of
the a.out header byte-order-independent.
the advantages:
(1) i386 gets an a_mid of its own
(2) (therefore) much easier to tell apart
binaries of different architectures
running BSD, which is beginning to
be a concern for us.
of course, both of the old a.out formats will be
supported, but by a compatibility option.
chris
--
Chris G. Demetriou cgd@cs.berkeley.edu
"386bsd as depth first search: whenever you go to fix something you
find that 3 more things are actually broken." -- Adam Glass