Date: Sat, 27 Feb 1999 11:05:56 -0800 (PST) From: John Polstra <jdp@polstra.com> To: tas@stephens.org Cc: hackers@freebsd.org Subject: Re: ELF, System V and multiple ABIs Message-ID: <199902271905.LAA10250@vashon.polstra.com> In-Reply-To: <199902171844.SAA24903@stephens.ml.org>
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In article <199902171844.SAA24903@stephens.ml.org>,
Thomas Stephens <tas@stephens.org> wrote:
> I was looking over the latest System V ABI draft, and noticed there is
> an update (dated April 1998) which includes modifications to the ELF
> format. Significantly, the usage of the e_ident array in the ElfXX_Ehdr
> structure has changed slightly, in order to allow for multiple ABIs on
> each hardware platform.
>
> While the ELF format defined in the previous draft only used the first
> seven bytes of e_ident, with byte eight (EI_PAD) representing the start
> of padding, the current one adds two new values to support an OS/ABI
> identifier number followed by a version. As a side-effect, EI_PAD has
> been redefined:
>
> EI_OSABI 7 (OS/ABI identifier)
> EI_ABIVERSION 8 (OS/ABI version)
> EI_PAD 9
>
> This new version of ELF currently defines EI_OSABI values for System V,
> HP-UX and stand-alone (embedded) applications, but it seems to me it
> would make things much easier if all ELF-compatible systems were to
> adopt it.
Thanks very much for pointing this out! I wasn't aware of it.
I think it would be great to adopt this, and it looks like we could do
it without breaking backward compatibility for our current "branding"
scheme.
Today I have written to a contact at SCO to try to get an OS/ABI code
assigned to FreeBSD. Hopefully that will bear some fruit and we can
move on to this scheme.
Again, thanks!
John
--
John Polstra jdp@polstra.com
John D. Polstra & Co., Inc. Seattle, Washington USA
"Nobody ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public."
-- H. L. Mencken
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