On Fri, Mar 22, 2002 at 10:53:38AM +0100, Emile Schwarz wrote:

 > Is ELF “just a new way” to build NetBSD (and Unix/Linux stuff) ?
 > and maybe only people with enough knowledge to program can (have to) understand ELF ?

ELF is a different executable format than the traditional a.out format.

It has better support for dynamic linking (such support in a.out was
an afterthought, and somewhat of a hack), and has other important
features like being able to have an arbitrary number of sections in
the image.

ELF also has ways to annotate program images.

Probably the most important, though, is that the ELF format is actively
supported by the GNU toolchain, whereas the old a.out format has essentially
been deprecated by everyone.  If we stick with a.out, it means a lot more
work for us, and as we all know, our time is better spent actually improving
the OS, not maintaining the toolchain.

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