Re: Has anyone looked at ELF 4.1?

[Geoff Keating <geoffk@ozemail.com.au>]

> Date: Tue, 11 Aug 1998 03:43:58 -0400
> From: Roland McGrath <roland@frob.com>

> I'm now going to proceed on the assumption that EI_OSABI is intended to
> indicate the operating system ABI expected by the program.  I make this
> assumption both because of its name, and because adding two fields whose
> sole meaning is "yes, really, the same file format spec" is just plain
> idiotic and I'm giving SCO a little (perhaps too much) credit for not being
> chalk full of complete idiots.

Have you noticed that the file format now defines OS-specific ranges
for many of the constants?

For instance,

SHT_LOOS      0x60000000
SHT_HIOS      0x6fffffff

Now, if you're going to have such things, it's good to have a tag in
the file format that says what a value of, say, 0x6fffffff means.
In the GNU toolchain, it means 'SHT_GNU_versym'; in Sun's or SGI's
implementation, it might mean something else.  So I imagine that this
is one of the things that EI_OSABI selects.

-- 
Geoffrey Keating <geoffk@ozemail.com.au>