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Date:      Fri, 24 Jan 2003 18:49:13 +1100
From:      matthew green <mrg@eterna.com.au>
To:        Pavel Cahyna <pavel.cahyna@st.mff.cuni.cz>
Cc:        freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG, debian-bsd@lists.debian.org
Subject:   re: glibc vs BSD libc 
Message-ID:  <26389.1043394553@splode.eterna.com.au>
In-Reply-To: your message of "Thu, 23 Jan 2003 18:41:27 BST." <20030123174127.GA15640@artax.karlin.mff.cuni.cz> 

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   To David Brownlee: I doubt NetBSD 1.0 binary could run against 
   a NetBSD 1.6 libc. They don't care much about binary compatibility. You
   could not even run a statically linked 1.0 app without some COMPAT_
   option in the kernel, I think.


when making such assertions it helps to be actually correct.  while it
is true that *any* old binary may require COMPAT_XX options in the kernel,
netbsd supports binaries back to 386bsd for i386, with shorter periods
of backwards compat for the newer plaforms.  i have personally run 386bsd
binaries on netbsd 1.5/i386.  i just downloaded the netbsd/sparc 1.0 
/bin/sh and:

russsian-intervention ~> uname -a
NetBSD russian-intervention.eterna.com.au 1.6M NetBSD 1.6M (_russian_) #719: Sun Jan 19 00:15:13 EST 2003     mrg@what-time-is-love.eterna.com.au:/var/_russian_ sparc
russian-intervention ~> file ./sh-sparc-1.0
./sh-sparc-1.0: NetBSD/sparc demand paged executable
russian-intervention ~> ./sh-sparc-1.0 
$ ps
  PID TT STAT      TIME COMMAND
  229 p0 Ss+    0:04.48 -tcsh 
  284 p1 Ss     0:02.16 -tcsh 
  327 p1 TN   178:29.44 systat -w1 vm 
14305 p1 S      0:00.07 ./sh-sparc-1.0 
14308 p1 R+     0:00.06 ps 
17424 p2 IWs    0:02.76 -tcsh 
22292 p2 SN+   12:38.86 top 


ie, that is a netbsd/sparc machine running a kernel that is only a few
days old, and it happily runs the 1.0 /bin/sh.  (this is a SMP kernel
with the new netbsd kernel-based userthreads implementation as well.)

i can not test a dynamic program from 1.0 because i don't have the
a.out libraries installed currently and i'm not bandwidth-connected
right now to download them... (took long enough for /bin/sh to
download!)  however, i have in the fairly recent past (in the last
year or so) run very old a.out dynamic sparc binaries on each of:

	- 32 bit sparc
	- 32 bit sparc64
	- 64 bit sparc64 with 32 bit binary support

when i was testing that the emulations work as LKM's.


i think you will find that netbsd cares _a whole lot_ about binary
compatibility.  to claim otherwise is simply fallacy.



.mrg.

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