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Re: elf32-mips breaks binary compatibility


> 
> > Right now I'm working on changing the current linker to tag all binaries
> > such that the dynamic linker can recognice them and do the right thing.
> > Mark has suggested using a DT_MIPS_LINUX_VERSION tag.  I'm a bit
> > reluctant to allocate such a new DT_ tag because MIPS / SGI are using them
> > for all sorts of purposes and I want to avoid a future clash.  So my
> > proposal which is a bit hackish would be to use the DT_MIPS_TIME_STAMP
> > tag with a special magic time stamp.  I've choosen the value 11717580
> > which is equivalent to a date in 1970, therfore should never ever be
> > generated in a binary generated by a SGI linker; current GNU linkers don't
> > emit this tag at all.  Comments?
> 
> With timestamp I see the problem what if quickstart is implemented in
> binutils (I still would like to give it a shot on sparc64 to see if the
> performance boost is worth the trouble), in which case we'll need to use
> DT_MIPS_TIME_STAMP...
> So IMHO DT_MIPS_LINUX_VERSION would not be very bad solution. And you could
> speak with SGI to leave that number for you in the specs.
> 

We had to deal with it on Alpha. That is why glibc 2.1 is libc.so.6.1
on alpha. Why cannot MIPS do the same? Glibc can require certain
version of binutils and use libc.so.6.1 for soname on MIPS.



H.J.

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