From owner-freebsd-hackers Thu Aug 21 09:20:56 1997 Return-Path: Received: (from root@localhost) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.5/8.8.5) id JAA01185 for hackers-outgoing; Thu, 21 Aug 1997 09:20:56 -0700 (PDT) Received: from phaeton.artisoft.com (phaeton.Artisoft.COM [198.17.250.50]) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.5/8.8.5) with SMTP id JAA01175 for ; Thu, 21 Aug 1997 09:20:50 -0700 (PDT) Received: (from terry@localhost) by phaeton.artisoft.com (8.6.11/8.6.9) id JAA23531; Thu, 21 Aug 1997 09:12:46 -0700 From: Terry Lambert Message-Id: <199708211612.JAA23531@phaeton.artisoft.com> Subject: Re: [Fwd: Re: Please Help Me Understand dlopen()] To: grog@lemis.com (Greg Lehey) Date: Thu, 21 Aug 1997 09:12:46 -0700 (MST) Cc: terry@lambert.org, hackers@FreeBSD.ORG In-Reply-To: <19970821084227.64768@lemis.com> from "Greg Lehey" at Aug 21, 97 08:42:27 am X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL24] MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: owner-freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG X-Loop: FreeBSD.org Precedence: bulk > > > What do you mean by "convert to ELF"? I hope you don't mean a > > > wholesale change. > > > > Why not? > > Because I don't have the time at the moment. I'm too busy finding > out why libc.so.3.0 doesn't build in -current, and thus blows my > world out of the water. But it does it by making it build. 8-) 8-). > I might change my mind. What I really don't understand is why a > wholesale changeover should be necessary: I certainly hope that the > new system will still be able to run a.out executables. Yes, of course. The main sticking point is that the boot blocks booting an ELF kernel can only boot an ELF kernel, so dancing back and forth, back and forth is a bit out of the question. Yes, the current boot hacks fit (barely; < 80 bytes remaining), but don't cover all the cases the a,out-only boot blocks do. The LKM situation is equally grim; the LKM's must be switched at the same time. This is because the LKM relocation is done by linking against the kernel symbol table. Try linking an a.out image against the kernel symbol table. Terry Lambert terry@lambert.org --- Any opinions in this posting are my own and not those of my present or previous employers.