Date: Sat, 31 May 1997 21:55:06 -0500 (EST) From: "John S. Dyson" <toor@dyson.iquest.net> To: softweyr@xmission.com (Wes Peters) Cc: psd@worldaccess.nl, questions@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Binaries Message-ID: <199706010255.VAA06402@dyson.iquest.net> In-Reply-To: <199705311936.NAA18541@obie.softweyr.ml.org> from Wes Peters at "May 31, 97 01:36:08 pm"
next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
> pauld@mail.dotcom.fr writes: > > Which binary format does FreeBSD use? (I looked into a file but it wasn't > > ELF like linux uses and I don't know if it's still a.out but that wouldn't > > be that great I think (adress space, that's why linux uses ELF)) > > FreeBSD uses a.out because there aren't any good reasons to change. > I'm not sure why Linux ended up with so many problems in their a.out > format, and won't speculate to avoid starting a flame war. ;^) > > ELF does not grant any larger address space than a.out, the address > space is pretty much dictated by the adressing model of the MMU. As far > as I know, both Linux and FreeBSD use the i386 32-bit flat memory model, > which yeilds a virtual address space of 2^32 bytes. > > FreeBSD does support Linux ELF binaries if you load the Linux emulator. > One more thing, FreeBSD does have native ELF support available. We have intentionally decided not to make it standard yet. The scales haven't tipped in the ELF direction yet, but may someday. There are a few problems with a.out, but those aren't normally apparent... ELF just isn't the solution to every binary format problem. ELF vs. a.out isn't generally a reason to choose an OS. John
Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?199706010255.VAA06402>