*BSD News Article 63885


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From: "H.J. Lu" <hjl@gnu.ai.mit.edu>
Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc
Subject: Re: FreeBSD ELF support
Date: Wed, 20 Mar 1996 07:38:03 -0800
Organization: Ooops
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Message-ID: <3150265B.41C67EA6@gnu.ai.mit.edu>
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Martin Ibert wrote:

> But I do like ELF a lot, and would like to see FreeBSD ELFed sooner or
> later. The three-pronged approach (current, stable, release) should
> take a lot of the pain out of the transition for those of us that
> prefer their OS to come from a CD-ROM. And if you are on current, you
> don't deserve a painless transition, do you? :-/
> 
> But doing it right (in my view) will require a lot of synchronisation
> with the Linux crowd (the world doesn't need another incompatible ELF
> variant), possibly up to and including synchronising library version
> numbers and symbol tables (so that you don't have to keep two sets of
> ELF libraries) so that Linux and FreeBSD ELF binaries are really one
> and the same.
>

Glad to see someone from FreeBSD who has some clues on ELF. BTW,
ELF can do more than those have been mentioned in this news
group. I have a list of things I want to do with ELF. I guess I
will never have the time to implement any of those. But I am
sure someday somehow someone will come up with the similar ideas.

As for ELF implementations, we, Linux, have added a few
extensions to ELF. I think they are very useful. We have an ELF
wish list. If we can work together, we may come up with a
super ELF. That will have the best of the whole world. But
first you have to run ELF for a while to understand why we want
to do those and you may have a better idea on how to improve it.

H.J.