> Looking around Acorn World I noticed that Russ King now has ARM Linux up
> and running on a Risc PC. He has implemented StrongARM support and is
> planning to support the ARM6 and ARM7 also. He has compiled X11R6 with 1,
> 4 and 8bpp X servers. 
> 
> He has shared libraries but only in a.out format, i.e. no
> position-independent code and no ELF. 

Can someone explain me why this isn't possible under RiscBSD ? 
 
> I was wondering what the possibilities for mutual development between
> RiscBSD and ARM Linux teams were ? Things that spring to mind are the gcc
> compiler and the X server/libraries, which might contain a lot of code
> common to both RiscBSD and ARM Linux. If the console interfaces were
> identical it might even be possible to develop a single X server for both
> systems, though I've no idea whether this is realistic. 

A common X server might be possible for *any* ARM based UNIX boxes, but a 
abstract videodevice must be developed with a unique programming interface on 
all of these systems. This meens the videodevice will be the hardware 
depending code that must be written for every machine with diffrent hardware.
On Atari and Amiga systems this was done and now you can use the same X server 
(binary!) on both machines.

> Another possibility might be a single format for executables, compiled
> with a common version of gcc. This would have obvious advantages when
> compiling and maintaining ports. 

I guess this would cause some drastic changes to the gcc code and will not be 
easy to realize. I'm not shure why they in Linux have invented the ELF format, 
but I think they had problems with the a.out. But now nearly everything in 
Linux is ELF now and I know no BSD system which can handle ELF binaries.

In general, it would be possible to make both systems a little bit more 
compatible, but therefore you must write some linux compat libs for BSD and 
some BSD compat libs for Linux. They must provide the functions the of the 
other system which are not available on the one wich is used *AND* they will 
be linked at runtime. This means you must have shared libs on both systems !
The next problem is that linux is SystemV compatible and RiscBSD is BSD; so 
you have completly (!) diffrent directory structures.

I think Linux for the RiscPC comes one and a half year to late and noone will 
drop his RiscBSD away for a system with less software available.

Ciao, Peter

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E-Mail: Peter.Berg@ww.tu-freiberg.de
WWW   : http://www.ww.tu-freiberg.de/~pberg