From owner-freebsd-hackers Sat Feb 27 11: 6:17 1999 Delivered-To: freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org Received: from wall.polstra.com (rtrwan160.accessone.com [206.213.115.74]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 93C9B150F3 for ; Sat, 27 Feb 1999 11:06:14 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from jdp@polstra.com) Received: from vashon.polstra.com (vashon.polstra.com [206.213.73.13]) by wall.polstra.com (8.9.1/8.9.1) with ESMTP id LAA12569; Sat, 27 Feb 1999 11:05:57 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from jdp@polstra.com) From: John Polstra Received: (from jdp@localhost) by vashon.polstra.com (8.9.2/8.9.1) id LAA10250; Sat, 27 Feb 1999 11:05:56 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from jdp@polstra.com) Date: Sat, 27 Feb 1999 11:05:56 -0800 (PST) Message-Id: <199902271905.LAA10250@vashon.polstra.com> To: tas@stephens.org Subject: Re: ELF, System V and multiple ABIs In-Reply-To: <199902171844.SAA24903@stephens.ml.org> Organization: Polstra & Co., Seattle, WA Cc: hackers@freebsd.org Sender: owner-freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG In article <199902171844.SAA24903@stephens.ml.org>, Thomas Stephens 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 To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message