Subject: Re: Emulations as LKM
To: Jarommr Dolecek <dolecek@ibis.cz>
From: Bill Studenmund <wrstuden@zembu.com>
List: tech-kern
Date: 11/13/2000 10:20:50
On Sun, 12 Nov 2000, Jarommr Dolecek wrote:

> Then a method would be added to kern_lkm.c to load emulations.
> When an emulation would be loaded, all supported exec format
> hooks for it would be loaded as well, LM_EXEC would probably
> get obsolete. I'm not sure about this bit. Though having
> an ability to load executable format support separately from
> emulation would be cool, I do not need it and I don't think
> (my) work in that area is worth (my) efford - it's not likely NetBSD
> itself would start to use other format than ELF. If you need

For i386, yes. But all of the a.out ports, well, they don't use ELF. So
their native format isn't ELF. Would it be interesting to be able to load
ELF loading code as an lkm by those folks developing -> ELF transition
tools for those architectures?

> to play with new exec format, it would still be possible
> to load the stuff via dummy emulation. Actually, making the new LM_EMUL
> LKM interface flexible enough to support adding execsw[] entry only
> would be probably not too difficult. But it should be able
> to add both emulation and appropriate execsw[] entries, as this
> would be common case.

Sounds good.

Take care,

Bill