On Fri, Sep 07, 2001 at 09:26:47AM -0500, J. Buck Caldwell wrote:

 > What exactly is the difference between ELF and what we're now using (a.out,
 > right?)? Are we going to see code speed increase; what about compilation
 > times; what about code size, memory usage, CPU-specific instruction support,
 > etc?

ELF is a modern executable format which is much more flexible.  We're
converting everything to ELF so that we can use a more modern toolchain.

ELF is going to be required in order to use e.g. pthreads (since the
threads library being worked on uses some of the features of the executable
format to do its work).

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