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Path: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au!newshost.carno.net.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!munnari.OZ.AU!news.ecn.uoknor.edu!feed1.news.erols.com!europa.clark.net!newsfeed.nacamar.de!fu-berlin.de!irz401!orion.sax.de!uriah.heep!news From: j@uriah.heep.sax.de (J Wunsch) Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc Subject: Re: ELF? Date: 24 Apr 1997 22:58:49 GMT Organization: Private BSD site, Dresden Lines: 36 Message-ID: <5jooj9$9c8@uriah.heep.sax.de> References: <cmott-2004971630470001@192.168.0.5> Reply-To: joerg_wunsch@uriah.heep.sax.de (Joerg Wunsch) NNTP-Posting-Host: localhost.heep.sax.de Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit X-Newsreader: knews 0.9.6 X-Phone: +49-351-2012 669 X-PGP-Fingerprint: DC 47 E6 E4 FF A6 E9 8F 93 21 E0 7D F9 12 D6 4E Xref: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc:39714 cmott@srv.net (Charles Mott) wrote: > Is this something that *BSD will have to > go through, or can it be avoided indefinitely? Some BSDs even have it already. :-) (Some Net/OpenBSD ports on machines where ELF has been the native format already.) Well, you're writing in the FreeBSD group... FreeBSD can already execute native ELF binaries for quite some time (more than a year). However, there's currently no ELF toolchain available in the official tree. There's no reason for us to perform a rushed transition from a.out to ELF. Unlike Linux, we have already a useable shared library format where it's not a pain in the *ss to create a shared lib. There are, of course, reasons that make ELF worthwhile, among them are better support for global constructors/destructors in C++, being more in line with the GNU binutils for as/ld, or allowing for more sections in the binary so to support pageable vs. non-pageable kernel address space, comment sections (for #ident) etc. Anyway, as you might have guessed, we have learned our lesson from the Linux desaster, and we still try to find the way that would allow us to migrate to ELF without causing any serious unwanted side-effects. Incidentally, a couple of days ago John ``Mr. ELF'' Polstra committed the required changes to the kernel tree to allow building an ELF kernel. The bootstrap changes are still missing, but John has got it working and is using ELF kernels for quite some time now. -- cheers, J"org joerg_wunsch@uriah.heep.sax.de -- http://www.sax.de/~joerg/ -- NIC: JW11-RIPE Never trust an operating system you don't have sources for. ;-)