Re: [PLUG] ELF Init section

[gabriel rosenkoetter <gr@eclipsed.net>]

On Sat, Jun 02, 2001 at 11:55:03PM -0400, Bill Jonas wrote:
> Ah, okay.  I started using Linux shortly after (if I understand my
> chronology correctly) shortly after (what I hear) was the very painful
> switch from a.out to ELF.  :)

::shrug::

I found NetBSD's switch from a.out to ELF basically painless on the
three platforms I've gone through it for, but I pretty much accepted
a re-install and had no locally developed binaries built for a.out
that would be difficult to rebuild. Keeping legacy binaries is the
only condition in which this is a problem, and NetBSD has a pretty
good architecture for this: all the binaries live under /emul/aout--
similarly Linux binaries live under /emul/linux--and have all the
appropriate libs installed in a full tree rooted there; ld.so
figures out the right thing to do based on the kind of binary its
told to run and chroot()s to the appropriate directory under /emul
to find the binares. At least, that's my vague, haven't-really-
looked-at-the-code understanding of what's going on.

> I bought a Dreamcast shortly after the price drop and I heard about the
> Linux and NetBSD ports.  :)

Yeah... Dreamcast is kind of a drag, as there's no convenient
writeable media for it. If it had more than one network connection,
it could make a decent firewall, but no such luck. One thing that's
really attractive about it, though, is that it makes no where near
as much noise as your average computer power supply, making it ideal
to be a machine to mount an NFS partition off another machine in
order to play mp3s as part of a stereo system.

(There are, of course, also some StrongARM-based machines that have
many of the same qualities and are a bit less finicky to deal with,
which is probably the way I'll go when I get around to putting a
machine in my stereo system for exactly that reason.)

> Right.  Has FreeBSD switched to ELF?

I'm sure they have, though I don't use FreeBSD (I basically use
NetBSD on all of my own machines; the OpenBSD examples come from a
computer that lives in cs.swarthmore.edu), and the best proof I can
find is here:

http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/cvsweb.cgi/src/gnu/usr.bin/ld/

Which lists, among other things, distinct man pages for ld and
ld.aout.

> If I can make a statement without causing a flamewar, I consider them to
> be two sides of the same coin; the same basic thing, but with different
> emphases.  One philosophical, one pragmatic.  (Although some of
> Stallman's writings refer to a "pragmatic idealism" on the Free Software
> side.)
> 
> I think that both are equally valid, and I use both terms, depending on
> who I'm talking to and exactly what sort of meaning I wish to convey.

Well. The real problem is that Mr. Stallman and I disagree (well, we
would if I cared enough to carry on a dialog with him, which I do
not) on the definition of free (speech) with regard to software. I
don't see forcing my licensing terms on my licensee as permitting
him a freedom.

> If you're feeling interested (or just want to do something really sick),
> check out http://www.muppetlabs.com/~breadbox/software/tiny/teensy.html

Heh. Lost me, at least this early in the morning on a Sunday and for
now, around the "making syscalls by hand" bit, but that's quite
interesting. (I'm incidentally vaguely amused by the use of wc -c
to count bytes in a binary rather than du. ;^>)

       ~ g r @ eclipsed.net


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