From owner-freebsd-hackers Thu May 8 16:19:36 1997 Return-Path: Received: (from root@localhost) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.5/8.8.5) id QAA25736 for hackers-outgoing; Thu, 8 May 1997 16:19:36 -0700 (PDT) Received: from rover.village.org (rover.village.org [204.144.255.49]) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.5/8.8.5) with SMTP id QAA25731 for ; Thu, 8 May 1997 16:19:33 -0700 (PDT) Received: from rover.village.org [127.0.0.1] by rover.village.org with esmtp (Exim 1.60 #1) id 0wPcT2-0007IO-00; Thu, 8 May 1997 17:19:20 -0600 To: Jason Thorpe Subject: Re: Alpha questions.. Cc: Ben Black , Brandon Gillespie , hackers@freebsd.org In-reply-to: Your message of "Thu, 08 May 1997 15:16:55 PDT." <199705082216.PAA20078@lestat.nas.nasa.gov> References: <199705082216.PAA20078@lestat.nas.nasa.gov> Date: Thu, 08 May 1997 17:19:20 -0600 From: Warner Losh Message-Id: Sender: owner-hackers@freebsd.org X-Loop: FreeBSD.org Precedence: bulk In message <199705082216.PAA20078@lestat.nas.nasa.gov> Jason Thorpe writes: : On Thu, 08 May 1997 16:12:02 -0600 : Warner Losh wrote: : : > Right now FreeBSD supports ELF w/o a hitch. People are always : > more than welcome to try the experimental, but promising looking, OLF : > on their own. : : ...I've said it again, but apparently it's worth a repeat. Folks who : read the "gas" mailing lists will know that the bintuils folks have : stomped on OLF at least a couple of times. I seriously doubt that : any binutils release will support it. That doesn't sound very promising : to me _at all_. : : Given that, looking at OLF would be, quite frankly, a silly idea. I was unaware that the FSF folks were so dead set against it. The concetp looks like a very fast way to dispatch the system calls based on the type of OS that you have (or more generally, whhc ABI the program conforms to). However, there are ways of doing this with ELF which aren't exactly fast, but aren't exactly slow either (assuming that the binaries are branded or otherwise marked). Warner