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Date:      Tue, 10 Feb 2004 10:45:53 -0500
From:      Nathan Hawkins <utsl@quic.net>
To:        Philip Reynolds <philip.reynolds@rfc-networks.ie>
Cc:        freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: ELF branding / magic numbers
Message-ID:  <20040210154553.GB69038@quic.net>
In-Reply-To: <20040205103154.GA99852@rfc-networks.ie>
References:  <20040205083945.GB96509@rfc-networks.ie> <20040205095636.GF13932@FreeBSD.org.ua> <20040205103154.GA99852@rfc-networks.ie>

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On Thu, Feb 05, 2004 at 10:31:54AM +0000, Philip Reynolds wrote:
> Ruslan Ermilov <ru@freebsd.org> 35 lines of wisdom included:
> > On Thu, Feb 05, 2004 at 08:39:45AM +0000, Philip Reynolds wrote:
> > [...]
> > > Does the magic number not then support multiple ABI's per system
> > > architecture, or is there some part of the puzzle I'm missing?
> > > 
> > There's an EI_ABIVERSION byte following the EI_OSABI byte, which
> > is both documented in the elf(5) manpage, and is shown in the
> > ``readelf -h'' output.
> 
> You misunderstood me. 
> 
> My question was why is there a need for a PT_NOTE section (which is
> a more convaluted way of branding and reading a brand of an elf
> binary) if the above sections exist?

Yes. It is used on other systems, like NetBSD and Linux. Having the note
section allows those system to correctly recognize FreeBSD binaries.
(The people developing binutils apparently don't agree with the use of
EI_OSABI.)

Unfortunately, FreeBSD doesn't check for it in the kernel. Doing it as a
fall-back would permit detecting statically linked Linux binaries,
without needing to run brandelf on them. I've been considering working
on a patch for that, but haven't had time.

	---Nathan



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