Re: 4.3BSD a.out compatibility issues in NetBSD

[Martin Husemann <martin%duskware.de@localhost>]

On Mon, Apr 13, 2009 at 12:23:26PM -0400, Thor Lancelot Simon wrote:
> I don't understand.  Does NetBSD actually fail to execute binaries
> that would be valid on an actual 4.3BSD system?  Or is the complaint
> simply that the 4.3BSD compiler, run on a NetBSD system, produces
> new "4.3" binaries which won't run on either system?

Exactly - but let me rephrase the question slightly:

If I read the docs correctly it is just fine that getpagesize(2) returns
the standard hardware page size (as it currently does), no matter what
kind of binary calls it. It is also fine for (old) pcc to use this value
to adjust the alignment of a.out sections.

The open question is: does (old) pcc do something wrong when creating the
headers for the differently aligned sections [so the binaries are invalid]
or is our a.out loader just not used to the iregular alignement and gets
something wrong [so the valid binaries are eroneously not executed correctly].

Martin