11 ms·

It seems worthwhile to me from the point of view of not keeping ancient junk around that almost nobody remembers exists anymore. It could have some security bu

It seems worthwhile to me from the point of view of not keeping ancient junk around that almost nobody remembers exists anymore. It could have some security bug, or it may complicate future work because changes break something in `binfmt_aout.c`, and then somebody has to figure out how to fix it and how to test that fix, which is probably a waste of time.

lokedhs 4y ago
It would be possible to maintain this as a lodable module out of tree if needed, so even me, who's all in favour of keeping all the old stuff, can agree that it makes sense to not have it in the kernel.
- dale_glass 4y ago
  Having it as a loadable module means it still has to compile, which means it adds a cost to maintenance work. The cost of obscure functionality can be extremely high. Say your change made this bit stop compiling. Now you might manage to fix the compile error, but how do you know it still works properly? Now you need to figure out how to test it. A formerly simple change can suddenly balloon into seeking out the 5 people in the world who still want this, and making sure they're happy.
  - lokedhs 4y ago
    What I meant was that the people who still want it can maintain it. Or at least fund someone to do the maintenance. The point was that just because it's removed from the kernel doesn't mean it has to disappear if there is still interest to keep it up to date.
    - dale_glass 4y ago
      Ok, but seems like an odd one to care about. The ELF transition was almost 30 years ago. Most anything earlier than that is in the garbage dump or a museum, and the software runs in a VM.
      - lokedhs 4y ago
        Oh I don't really care about it other than from a nostalgia point of view. I started using Linux at 0.99 or so. I don't think I've used anything but ELF since it was introduced. And recent developments have shown that ELF is not a barrier to getting old binaries working (the recent port of Word Perfect for Unix).
  - Annatar 4y ago
- tssva 4y ago
  ipx and ncpfs are examples of this. They were removed in 4.18 but have been maintained outside of the kernel. I use the ipx loadable module on a couple of systems running recent kernel versions.
nraynaud 4y ago
I was a bit dumbfounded by the article because I forgot that a.out is a format before being a filename.
- lokedhs 4y ago
  I'm pretty sure it started out as a file name, it being the default output name of the C compiler in Unix. It didn't become the name of a format until Linux, and I think it really didn't get that name until ELF was introduced in Linux since they needed a way to distinguish the two formats.
  - nineteen999 4y ago
    From Wikipedia (and I've always understood this to be true): > This is an abbreviated form of "assembler output", the filename of the output of Ken Thompson's PDP-7 assembler https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A.out https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A.out

lokedhs 4y ago

It would be possible to maintain this as a lodable module out of tree if needed, so even me, who's all in favour of keeping all the old stuff, can agree that it makes sense to not have it in the kernel.

dale_glass 4y ago
Having it as a loadable module means it still has to compile, which means it adds a cost to maintenance work. The cost of obscure functionality can be extremely high. Say your change made this bit stop compiling. Now you might manage to fix the compile error, but how do you know it still works properly? Now you need to figure out how to test it. A formerly simple change can suddenly balloon into seeking out the 5 people in the world who still want this, and making sure they're happy.
- lokedhs 4y ago
  What I meant was that the people who still want it can maintain it. Or at least fund someone to do the maintenance. The point was that just because it's removed from the kernel doesn't mean it has to disappear if there is still interest to keep it up to date.
  - dale_glass 4y ago
    Ok, but seems like an odd one to care about. The ELF transition was almost 30 years ago. Most anything earlier than that is in the garbage dump or a museum, and the software runs in a VM.
    - lokedhs 4y ago
      Oh I don't really care about it other than from a nostalgia point of view. I started using Linux at 0.99 or so. I don't think I've used anything but ELF since it was introduced. And recent developments have shown that ELF is not a barrier to getting old binaries working (the recent port of Word Perfect for Unix).
- Annatar 4y ago
tssva 4y ago
ipx and ncpfs are examples of this. They were removed in 4.18 but have been maintained outside of the kernel. I use the ipx loadable module on a couple of systems running recent kernel versions.

nraynaud 4y ago

I was a bit dumbfounded by the article because I forgot that a.out is a format before being a filename.

lokedhs 4y ago
I'm pretty sure it started out as a file name, it being the default output name of the C compiler in Unix. It didn't become the name of a format until Linux, and I think it really didn't get that name until ELF was introduced in Linux since they needed a way to distinguish the two formats.
- nineteen999 4y ago
  From Wikipedia (and I've always understood this to be true): > This is an abbreviated form of "assembler output", the filename of the output of Ken Thompson's PDP-7 assembler https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A.out https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A.out