Re: Patch for MIPS targets...

[Daniel Jacobowitz <dmj+ at andrew dot cmu dot edu>]

On Fri, Apr 27, 2001 at 08:38:47AM -0700, H . J . Lu wrote:
> On Fri, Apr 27, 2001 at 05:08:41PM +0200, Andreas Jaeger wrote:
> > - This glibc will not work with applications that have been using
> >   linked against an older glibc.
> > 
> 
> I don't know about it. Someone with MIPS has to verify it. On the
> other hand, I don't think we have enough MIPS installation base to
> worry about it. For the worst case, we give MIPS a new soname. BTW,
> I will bet the old MIPS glibc doesn't work too well since binutils
> generated the IRIX ABI, but glibc only supports the SVR4 MIPS ABI.
> I was wondering if you could send me the output of
> 
> # /lib/libc.so.6
> 
> with the old MIPS glibc.

Bus error.  Despite that, however, pretty much everything works.

Note that giving a new soname wouldn't really help at all.  You'd have
to bump the soname of the dynamic linker itself, and that would mean
recompiling just about everything anyway.  The only difference between
the two ABIs appears to be the base address of shared objects!

I've several times posted to the mips list asking the simple questions
that I need answers to in order to write backwards compatibility code
for this problem.  When I originally made the patch, I noticed that the
virtual address of the first LOAD command is almost always the same as
the MIPS_BASE_ADDRESS entry in DT_INFO.  When is that not true?

-- 
Daniel Jacobowitz                           Debian GNU/Linux Developer
Monta Vista Software                              Debian Security Team