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in good old days you could use COM or a.out format which are literally just code instead of fancy headers etc. a.out binaries used less memory as well. I could
by iberator 8mo ago
in good old days you could use COM or a.out format which are literally just code instead of fancy headers etc. a.out binaries used less memory as well. I could run Linux Slackware with 2mb of ram instead of 4
- jlokier 8mo ago.COM binaries yes, but a.out binaries do have a header, similar in size to ELF. When ELF was added to Linux, I think it used a bit less RAM than a.out. ELF made it easier to build and deploy shared libraries, and the design was more consistent at keeping code sections read-only despite run-time linking (the PLT stuff), so more RAM pages ended up automatically shared between processes by the kernel, compared with a.out.