Date: Thu, 1 Jan 1998 16:48:04 +0100 From: Ollivier Robert <roberto@keltia.freenix.fr> To: hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: FreeBSD ELF status? Message-ID: <19980101164804.30732@keltia.freenix.fr> In-Reply-To: <199712311722.JAA19985@austin.polstra.com>; from John Polstra on Wed, Dec 31, 1997 at 09:22:57AM -0800 References: <troyc-9711292202.AA000121949@sandy> <199712311722.JAA19985@austin.polstra.com>
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According to John Polstra: > Everybody who was working on it got very busy with paywork, so there > hasn't been much progress lately. We still have hopes of having it > ready for 3.0-RELEASE, but time will tell whether that will work out > or not. The primary obstacle remaining is The Migration Problem. After giving some thoughts on the subject, here is what I got: - we must put into the source various tools such as binutils & gcc (preferably egcs or pgcc IMO) before. That is a very big increase of the tree size. - after that, we must decide if we want to converted system to be able to generate a.out binaries or not. That's the main issue I guess. The former is much more difficult to handle because that would mean keeping two versions of too many things in the tree and it is probably a nightmare. The latter greatly simplify (:-)) the process because I see the bootstrapping as an added phase before making the world. make bootstrap would compile the libs new gcc/binutils as crosscompiling tools generating i386-unknown-freebsdelf files and installing them inside /usr/obj/.../tmp. make world then takes theses tools and compile the world the usual way, recompiling the new tools as normal ELF binaries. We'd need to generate a compat-a.out.tgz tree with the "old" tools (ld.so, all libs and so on) to let people runing old binaries (CURRENT is less of an issue here). /usr/lib/aout ? /usr/lib/i386-unknown-freebsd ? Considering the boot blocks size issue, it is more of an all or nothing thing because if we want to boot our shiny new kernel, we need the new boot blocks. If someone can do the Mithical 3-Stage Bootblock, it would be easier (no I'm not volunteering :-)). - next phase is getting rid of the old tools' sources from the tree (my modem has started sweating at the CTM delta size :-). -- Ollivier ROBERT -=- FreeBSD: The Power to Serve! -=- roberto@keltia.freenix.fr FreeBSD keltia.freenix.fr 3.0-CURRENT #21: Sat Dec 27 06:10:06 CET 1997
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