Date: Sat, 15 Aug 1998 10:05:16 -0700 From: John Polstra <jdp@polstra.com> To: current@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: ELF problems to occur Message-ID: <199808151705.KAA17832@austin.polstra.com> In-Reply-To: <Pine.BSF.4.02.9808141211110.12318-100000@zone.syracuse.net> References: <Pine.BSF.4.02.9808141211110.12318-100000@zone.syracuse.net>
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> The transition from a.out to ELF will not be easy; I see some definite > potential hangups: We are aware of these things and are doing our best to solve the most important problems in time for the release. Please understand, there are going to be many small-to-medium problems and things that don't work quite right at first. We are trying to get the a.out->ELF transition done in -current as soon as possible, so that there will be time to work out the worst problems before 3.0 is released. John Birrell is putting in a heroic effort toward that end. Being uniprocessor humans, we can't work on ELF and reply to the mailing lists at the same time. To those who keep whining, "When will ELF be ready?" the answer is: another 10 minutes later, thanks to you. > Will I have to recompile all my many libraries for ELF > or will objcopy work in all cases? Objcopy doesn't understand a.out shared libraries. A special converter will be necessary. I've got it started, but have serious doubts about whether it will be ready in time for 3.0. > M3 should already be ELF-compilable I'm the maintainer of the M3 port, and I think it will take some work to get it to generate ELF. No major problems, just some work. It's one of the lower priorities, as far as I'm concerned. You will probably have to continue to use it as a.out at first. The same undoubtedly holds for a number of other ports. Remember, things that don't work under ELF can still be built as a.out programs until they are fixed. > I don't see how ldconfig is in its present state ready for ELF. For the short term, you may have to simply ensure that LD_LIBRARY_PATH is set properly. It's on my list to fix the ELF dynamic linker so that it can also get its search path from the ldconfig hints file. "ldconfig -r" or something like it will also have to be fixed for ELF, because the ports system relies on it to determine whether shared library dependencies are already installed or not. > And supposedly the ELF kernel is bootable nowadays with a few > patches; do lkm's work? I doubt we'll have time to switch the kernel to ELF before 3.0 release. -- John Polstra jdp@polstra.com John D. Polstra & Co., Inc. Seattle, Washington USA "Self-knowledge is always bad news." -- John Barth To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-current" in the body of the message
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