From owner-freebsd-current Mon Mar 18 15:42:10 2002 Delivered-To: freebsd-current@freebsd.org Received: from scaup.prod.itd.earthlink.net (scaup.mail.pas.earthlink.net [207.217.120.49]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 588CB37B400 for ; Mon, 18 Mar 2002 15:42:06 -0800 (PST) Received: from pool0273.cvx21-bradley.dialup.earthlink.net ([209.179.193.18] helo=mindspring.com) by scaup.prod.itd.earthlink.net with esmtp (Exim 3.33 #1) id 16n6lE-000036-00; Mon, 18 Mar 2002 15:41:53 -0800 Message-ID: <3C967B2D.9C0403FD@mindspring.com> Date: Mon, 18 Mar 2002 15:41:33 -0800 From: Terry Lambert X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.7 [en]C-CCK-MCD {Sony} (Win98; U) X-Accept-Language: en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: John Polstra Cc: current@freebsd.org, mark@grondar.za Subject: Re: rtld messing up? References: <200203112131.g2BLVtDN043534@grimreaper.grondar.org> <200203181926.g2IJQxW01655@vashon.polstra.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: owner-freebsd-current@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk List-ID: List-Archive: (Web Archive) List-Help: (List Instructions) List-Subscribe: List-Unsubscribe: X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG John Polstra wrote: > All I know is this: The dynamic linker was working just fine for > years. Then we got a new version of binutils, and lots of problems > started happening. The dynamic linker wasn't changed -- binutils > was. I have no idea what got broken, but I kind of doubt that the > bug is in the dynamic linker. The new binutils screws over some basic long-standing assumptions about field ordering and associativity in the object files, which are no longer maintained (for whatever reason) in the new version of the tools. Some of them have been identified and repaired (e.g. the Alpha code changes for the section/segment order assumption), but it is going to probably be a long battle. Technically, the ELF spec permits the ordering, so the assumptions are really "broken", even though they code for what's really a defacto-standard of many years, now. 8-(. I hate the new binutils, but they are required for support for the 64 bit architectures, so they are not going to just go away. I think retrofitting support for these architectures into the old binutils would be a mistake. It's a little sad, since with the assumptions, the code would have been faster on initial execution, than without them. -- Terry To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-current" in the body of the message