In article <199510220352.UAA23887@lestat.nas.nasa.gov> Jason Thorpe <thorpej@nas.nasa.gov> writes:
>
>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 think there are two things that we will gain.

1. uniformity of executable format across platforms.
2. ability to use the latest and greatest of the gnu tools without extensive
   modifications.

and of course all the advantages Elf has over a.out.

> > 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...

I've been trying to lobby the use of the note field, but noone seems to
care or listen.

christos