Subject: Re: Shared library support for ARM ELF
To: Matt Thomas <matt@3am-software.com>
From: Richard Earnshaw <rearnsha@arm.com>
List: port-arm26
Date: 07/16/2001 10:31:13
> This weekend, in a fit of insanity, I've implemented and
> committed most of the pieces for ELF shared library support
> on ARM.  I have no idea whether it works on arm26 but I'd
> to see if someone (Ben?) can confirm that.
> 
> ftp://ftp.netbsd.org/pub/incoming/matt/armelf.tgz
> 
> contains a small sampling of ARM programs (sh, ps, md5)
> plus libc.so and ld.elf_so.  Just untar it and chroot into
> it is the easiest way to verify it (which is why I included
> sh).
> 
> Note that to use it you will need to rebuild your kernel with
> EXEC_ELF32.  Also, a few new sysctl's were added to better
> support the comming shared arm (arm32+arm26) environment so
> I'd appreciate it if you can try the ps and see if it does the
> right thing for you (since I had to modify libkvm a bit).
> 
> I haven't verified that c++ does the right thing yet since the
> in-pool libgcc doesn't work since 2.95.3 c++ objects to a few
> things in it.  Making a totally ELF snapshot is not yet possible
> due to lack of toolchain integration.  But almost everything else
> builds cleanly.

We should be careful not to start distributing shared-library based ELF 
builds until we are certain that we have got the ABI of the compiler 
correct.

R.