On Sun, 22 Oct 1995 00:54:07 GMT 
 christos@deshaw.com (Christos Zoulas) wrote:

 > I don't think that this is a general and workable solution. What happens
 > when NetBSD gets native elf binaries?

When is that anticipated?  I would certainly resist moving to ELF in the 
general case.  I mean, ports (like the mips, etc.) that pretty much need 
ELF should use it, but why change the i386, m68k, sparc, etc. ports?  
They work Just Fine with a.out, and I would certainly like to keep it 
that way...

I guess that begs the question of what would NetBSD _gain_ from going to 
ELF-for-all?

 > I suggest that Linux starts using the "note" field to indicate that it
 > is a linux binary. If NetBSD/ELF uses that field too to indicate that this
 > is a NetBSD binary, then that should identify between the 3 exec formats
 > using elf.

Unfortunately, that doesn't do any good for pre-existing Linux ELF 
executables, providing, of course, that Linux (well, whomever it is that 
actually makes decisions on the architecture of the Linux kernel) does 
decide to do something of that nature...

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Jason R. Thorpe                                       thorpej@nas.nasa.gov
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