Subject: Re: "real" OpenBSD compat - how hard would it be?
To: Alaric B. Snell <alaric@alaric-snell.com>
From: Jason Thorpe <thorpej@wasabisystems.com>
List: port-i386
Date: 03/20/2003 07:59:21
On Thursday, March 20, 2003, at 04:38  AM, Alaric B. Snell wrote:

> Can we ask 'em to fix this?

I suspect that would be a largely fruitless effort.

> Or a tool to patch an OpenBSD executable to mark it as not being 
> NetBSD any
> more by poking the magic number...

This is probably a better solution.  We could allocate a new a.out 
magic number that said "OpenBSD binary", and then write a small tool 
that adjusted the magic number of a binary appropriately.  This would 
be trivial.

But, as Roland pointed out, we're probably better off bootstrapping 
from a platform which uses a modern executable format, like FreeBSD or 
Linux (which use ELF, just like we do).

         -- Jason R. Thorpe <thorpej@wasabisystems.com>