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You might be interested in this LWN article on the topic: https://lwn.net/Articles/888741/ https://lwn.net/Articles/888741/ Excerpt: -- Kees Cook did do a li
by kleiba 4y ago
You might be interested in this LWN article on the topic: https://lwn.net/Articles/888741/ https://lwn.net/Articles/888741/
Excerpt:
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Kees Cook did do a little research on, seemingly, the only distribution that still supports Alpha (Gentoo) and found that the only ECOFF files present contained firmware, which does not run on the CPU anyway. He concluded that there would be no harm from removing a.out support on this platform: ""Let's do it"".
It seems to be a universal rule that somebody always has to come along to ruin the party. In this case, just as it seemed like there were no further obstacles to the removal of a.out, James Jones showed up to let it be known that he was still using a.out:
The use case is running an old set of tools to build programs for the Atari Jaguar. Namely, Atari's assembler (mac) and linker (aln). The alternative is running windows versions in dosbox, or using some replacements that have been developed based on an even older, less-featureful version of the source code for mac and aln, but which still haven't managed to add back in all the features needed to build some programs or use the Atari debugging tools (Also available in a.out only)."
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And here the HN discussion on said article: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30792059 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30792059
- KennyBlanken 4y agoI'm sure James Jones is perfectly capable of running a LTS kernel that still has support for a.out. He's working on decades old platforms...this really shouldn't phase him.
- mid-kid 4y agoI wonder if those programs wouldn't be easy enough to convert into ELF. From cursory reading, it doesn't look like the format contains anything that wouldn't be able to be represented in an ELF file. Am I missing something?
- yjftsjthsd-h 4y agoActually, that begs the question: can a.out be supported fully in user space, either by converting the file or via user space "interpreter"?
- jraph 4y agoI wondered the same thing. With binfmt_misc it could be seamless.
- rrss 4y agoYes https://lwn.net/ml/linux-kernel/202203161523.857B469@keescook/ https://lwn.net/ml/linux-kernel/202203161523.857B469@keescoo...
- yjftsjthsd-h 4y agoExcellent! This really should be one of the big headliner items, then; it's a lot easier to sell removing something from the kernel if there's already an implementation to do the same thing in userspace.
- account42 4y ago/\* This should be unreachable. \*/ fprintf(stderr, "They found me. I don't how, but they found me.\n"); :)
- reidrac 4y agoHe can still run those on a kernel that has a.out support; and he can run that on a VM instead of using dos box or any of the other more complicated alternatives. I mean, dropping a.out support is not a retroactive change.