Date: Tue, 29 Jul 1997 21:29:49 -0700 From: John Polstra <jdp@polstra.com> To: TLiddelow@cybec.com.au (Tim Liddelow) Cc: msmith@atrad.adelaide.edu.au, current@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: pccard and -current; a long way to go. :-( Message-ID: <199707300429.VAA07677@austin.polstra.com> In-Reply-To: Your message of "Wed, 30 Jul 1997 11:06:36 %2B1000." <33DE939C.E3907FDE@cybec.com.au>
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> > I'm not complaining,
> > but I'm also not feeling encouraged to expend any more effort on
> > it.
>
> Well that's a shame John; you may remember my enthusiasm a few years
> back regarding your efforts and I still feel that way. I just think
> that perhaps a little bit of PR is in order - why is ELF a good thing?
> (I know, but perhaps other people don't). What would be the benefits
> of moving to ELF ? Perhaps you've already done this ... I don't
> know.
The people who recognize the benefits of moving to ELF are the ones
who need to do the PR. The question is not "would ELF be better?"
but rather "would ELF be _enough_ better to make it worth the pain
of the transition?" Focusing on the language tools as I have, I see
certain benefits:
* Our linker has major design faults in its handling of shared
libraries. They're probably never going to be fixed without
a rewrite of the whole thing or at least the shared library
code. The ELF linker doesn't have these faults.
* The ELF tools are maintained by people besides us.
* There are many bugs in g++ which cause the dreaded "relocation
burbs" for a.out. These bugs happen to make no difference for
ELF. They are in areas of the compiler that are a total mess
and that are extremely complicated. I have already fixed the
ones that are "easy enough" to fix. Because they affect only
us, the remaining bugs are never going to be fixed, in my
opinion.
These benefits are real, but I'm not sure they're enough. (If you
are looking for a facts-be-damned advocate of FreeBSD-ELF, I'm not
your guy.) There is plenty of room for intelligent disagreement
about it. I myself have about three opinions on the subject, all
in conflict with one another. :-)
I am sure there would be other benefits, but I don't know enough
about them to lobby on their behalf. The people who do are the
ones who need to do the PR. Explain why FreeBSD would be a better
place if it used ELF. So far nobody's done a very good job of
that. "Pageable kernel data areas?" Yawn. What does it mean to
me as a user or as a developer? Would the system run faster? Use
less memory? How much faster? How much less? Who's going to
implement it if we switch to ELF? Enquiring minds want to know.
John
--
John Polstra jdp@polstra.com
John D. Polstra & Co., Inc. Seattle, Washington USA
"Self-knowledge is always bad news." -- John Barth
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