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Path: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au!newshost.anu.edu.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!news.mel.connect.com.au!munnari.OZ.AU!news.ecn.uoknor.edu!qns3.qns.com!imci4!newsfeed.internetmci.com!news.mathworks.com!fu-berlin.de!cs.tu-berlin.de!informatik.uni-bremen.de!nordwest.pop.de!uniol!uni-erlangen.de!news.tu-chemnitz.de!irz401!uriah.heep!news From: j@uriah.heep.sax.de (J Wunsch) Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc Subject: Re: FreeBSD vs Linux Date: 4 Apr 1996 21:02:27 GMT Organization: Private BSD site, Dresden Lines: 44 Message-ID: <4k1dd3$krb@uriah.heep.sax.de> References: <4issad$h1o@nadine.teleport.com> <Pine.PMDF.3.91.960324150948.9390A-100000@plains.uwyo.edu> <4jejjt$cdb@park.uvsc.edu> <315E0F1A.4E3FB53D@lucon.org> <Pine.LNX.3.91.960401105810.31921A-100000@gallup.cia-g.com> <4jqpn8$euv@agate.berkeley.edu> <4jsq5i$5ko@main.gbdata.com> <4jvm5n$2v8@agate.berkeley.edu> Reply-To: joerg_wunsch@uriah.heep.sax.de (Joerg Wunsch) NNTP-Posting-Host: localhost.heep.sax.de Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit X-Newsreader: knews 0.9.3 nickkral@america.CS.Berkeley.EDU (Nick Kralevich) writes: > FreeBSD will eventually have to move to ELF. What's where all the We will certainly decide this ourselves. It's not even unlikely that the kernel might be the first binary that switches to ELF :), since it could profit most from the switch. > Eventually, FreeBSD _has_ to switch to ELF. That's why the ELF code > is being added to FreeBSD. You are over-estimating your opinion. The ELF code has been added since some guys were interested in working on it, even though it was quite clear that it's only of theoretical use by now. > I disagree with the notion that switching > binary formats will be easy for the FreeBSD team. It won't be. What does you make believe this? > Also, from a software development point of view, knowing that FreeBSD > is going to change binary formats is a disincentive to developing > commercial software for FreeBSD. Uh-oh, i'm absolutely certain that even switching to ELF won't make the a.out support go away. I can still run every i386/BSD binary i've got around, back to 386BSD 0.1 ones. For dynamic executables, the added cost is memory wastage due to the required shared libs, for static binaries (most if not all commercial apps by now are), the memory wastage is obvious, but you don't even need to keep old shlibs in the file system. Btw., the switch (if it will ever happen :) is unlikely to be before FreeBSD 2.2R. This is, it looks like it won't happen this year. (Note: this is not an official FreeBSD statement, just my personal estimation.) -- cheers, J"org joerg_wunsch@uriah.heep.sax.de -- http://www.sax.de/~joerg/ -- NIC: JW11-RIPE Never trust an operating system you don't have sources for. ;-)