Subject: Re: Object compatibility between BSDs
To: None <briggs@ninthwonder.com>
From: Brad Spencer <brad@anduin.eldar.org>
List: port-i386
Date: 01/20/2000 18:44:13
   >      Having ported our project to NetBSD 1.3.3, we are obviously interested
   > in porting to FreeBSD and OpenBSD as well.  A colleague claimed that BSD
   > a.out objects should be usable as-is on all three OS's, but I've tried our
   > exe's on OpenBSD 2.5 with no luck ("Bad system call").  And we are even
   > statically linked with ALL libraries (libc, etc.), so it shouldn't be a lib
   > compatibility problem.

   My understanding is that OpenBSD and NetBSD have both added system calls
   since the source trees diverged, and OpenBSD has never distinguished its
   executables from NetBSD's so there's no easy way to do the emulation that
   we do with FreeBSD, Linux, SVR4, et al.

Ya, this is my observation also.  It should be possible to write a small
utility to "color" an OpenBSD binary in such a way as to make it look
different from a NetBSD binary.  It should be possible at that point to
write an emulation layer to execute them.

   For i386, anyway, you should be able to generate FreeBSD executables and
   run them on all three.

Yup..  FreeBSD binaries seem to work fine.

   Good luck!

   -allen




Brad Spencer - brad@anduin.eldar.org   http://anduin.eldar.org
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