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Path: sserve!newshost.anu.edu.au!munnari.oz.au!news.Hawaii.Edu!ames!elroy.jpl.nasa.gov!decwrl!usenet.coe.montana.edu!grapevine.lcs.mit.edu!ai-lab!life.ai.mit.edu!mycroft From: mycroft@trinity.gnu.ai.mit.edu (Charles Hannum) Newsgroups: comp.os.386bsd.questions Subject: Binary compatibility and NetBSD 0.9 (Re: Will XFree86-1.3 work under NetBSD-0.9?) Date: 24 Aug 1993 23:35:04 GMT Organization: MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab Lines: 25 Message-ID: <MYCROFT.93Aug24193504@trinity.gnu.ai.mit.edu> References: <1993Aug24.143022.3789@news.weeg.uiowa.edu> NNTP-Posting-Host: trinity.gnu.ai.mit.edu In-reply-to: jboggs@news.weeg.uiowa.edu's message of Tue, 24 Aug 1993 14:30:22 GMT [FAQ fodder] Consider this a definitive answer. NetBSD/i386 runs 386BSD, FreeBSD, NetBSD/i386 0.8, and most BSDI executables. However, due to upgrading to the latest version of the UCB DB library, programs which use said library cannot be mixed old and new; e.g. an old `ls' cannot read the pwd.db file created with a new `pwd_mkdb', and vice versa. This caveat is also true of FreeBSD, though it cannot run BSDI or NetBSD/i386 0.9 executables. Also, due to better (read: properly) enforced address space protections, some incorrectly written programs which seemed to work under 386BSD or NetBSD/i386 0.8 will core dump under NetBSD/i386 0.9, even when recompiled. The default executable format produced by the NetBSD 0.9 `ld' is not downward compatible with FreeBSD or 386BSD. It is essentially the same as BSDI's QMAGIC format and Sun's normal format--with no padding between the exec header and the first page of text, and with the first page of the address space always unmapped when loaded--except that the magic numbers are in the conventional `magic + machine id' format, and are in network (big-endian) order.