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Path: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au!newshost.anu.edu.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!msunews!agate!howland.reston.ans.net!EU.net!Germany.EU.net!news.dfn.de!RRZ.Uni-Koeln.DE!se From: se@MI.Uni-Koeln.DE (Stefan Esser) Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc Subject: Re: Will FreeBSD ever support ELF? Date: 13 Oct 1995 14:49:14 GMT Organization: Institute for Mathematics, University of Cologne, Germany Lines: 42 Message-ID: <45lu9a$408@news.rrz.uni-koeln.de> References: <oenwlx9v8.fsf@vapor.Franz.COM> <45hbnd$9ln@uriah.heep.sax.de> NNTP-Posting-Host: sysiphos.mi.uni-koeln.de In article <45hbnd$9ln@uriah.heep.sax.de>, j@uriah.heep.sax.de (J Wunsch) writes: |> Kevin Layer <layer@Franz.COM> wrote: |> >It seems that GCC is moving toward making ELF the object file format |> >standard and making shared libraries possible. Given this and *if* |> >there are no plans for FreeBSD to support ELF (I can't remember seeing |> >a discussion about it), then won't this pose a problem for continued |> >use of GCC on FreeBSD? |> |> Why should the ELF support of GNU cc/ld mean that a.out support will |> be removed? |> |> Anyway, you're more than welcome to supply patches that make FreeBSD |> run with ELF binaries. :-) Well, do we really want this ? Introducing a new binary and shared library format for no good reason means, that we'll have to deal with both formats for a long time to come. Linux had a reason to go to ELF, since their previous shared library system offered very low execution time overhead, but made building your own shared libraries a pain. There is nothing magcial about ELF. It's just that the Common Object File Format introduced in System V Unix turned out to be not that common :) and that something more flexible was needed for System V.4 ... So, there really ought to be GOOD reasons to introduce ELF in FreeBSD, and I don't see any (except that the Linux emulator should support ELF at some time, but this is not much of a problem currently, since for a long time to come just about every Linux binary will be available in both a.out and ELF format ...) -- Stefan Esser, Zentrum fuer Paralleles Rechnen Tel: +49 221 4706021 Universitaet zu Koeln, Weyertal 80, 50931 Koeln FAX: +49 221 4705160 ============================================================================== http://www.zpr.uni-koeln.de/staff/esser/esser.html <se@ZPR.Uni-Koeln.DE>