Re: support for FreeBSD and GNU/FreeBSD

["David O'Brien" <obrien at FreeBSD dot org>]

On Mon, Jul 08, 2002 at 02:17:45PM +0200, Bruno Haible wrote:
> Alan Modra writes:
> 
> > Which "branding" scheme do you want to be default, the one somewhat
> > incompatible with the ELF standard or the one more grossly
> > incompatible?  ;)
> 
> The grossly incompatible one, because that's the format that all
> FreeBSD kernel versions support.

Actually it isn't.  I've been killing that one off.  6.0 will not support
it, and 5.0 might not.  5.0's binutils (2.13 or later) will not generate
binaries with that form of branding.  Also FreeBSD/sparc64 and
FreeBSD/ia64 5.0 will not support the old hack as there is no backwards
compatibility to worry about.

All FreeBSD kernel's since 6-July-2000 (FreeBSD 4.1 and later) accept the
ELF ABI-compliant one.[*]

[*] ABI lawyers have now said it really isn't compliant, but it was with
earlier revisions.


> But then someone using --enable-targets=all would get binaries which
> run on FreeBSD >= 4.1 only, whereas someone using
> --host=i486-pc-freebsd[-gnu] would get binaries which run on all
> FreeBSD versions. That would be confusing.

150% disagree.  Anyone still using FreeBSD 4.0 is doing so because they
wish to remain frozen in time (for what ever reason).  They are not the
type of person to update their binutils.

I'm afraid I'm going to have to put on my FreeBSD hat and strongly state
that EI_OSABI==ELFOSABI_FREEBSD is what should be the default.

And a last request -- please stop saying "binaries" and say "static
binaries".  As I mentioned before, system call API is determined by the
dynamic interrupter for un-branded binaries.

-- 
-- David  (obrien@FreeBSD.org)