[1129] in netbsd-help mailing list archive
Re: problems with NetBSD/Linux compatibility?
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Greg Hudson)
Wed Apr 23 03:29:00 1997
To: alexp@MIT.EDU
Cc: netbsd-help@MIT.EDU
In-Reply-To: Your message of "Mon, 14 Apr 1997 11:56:23 EDT."
<9704141556.AA21507@dit.MIT.EDU>
Date: Wed, 23 Apr 1997 03:28:43 EDT
From: Greg Hudson <ghudson@MIT.EDU>
Hi, Alex. I just looked into the NetBSD problem with Mathematica. It
turns out that NetBSD 1.2 can't run statically linked Linux ELF
binaries, because it falsely recognizes them as being SVR4 binaries.
(The ELF specification doesn't provide a way of differentiating the
two.) The next version of NetBSD (presumably 1.3) has some heuristic
tests which should solve the problem.
To determine if a Linux executable is statically linked, you can use
the "ldd" command on a Linux machine. It will say "statically linked
(ELF)" if it's a statically linked ELF executable. The vast majority
of programs come dynamically linked, which is why we haven't seen this
problem before.
I think the right thing to do for now is to put a startup message on
the NetBSD version of Mathematica 3 saying that it doesn't run under
NetBSD 1.2 and that users should contact netbsd-help@mit.edu for
assistance if they really want to run it under NetBSD. Then have it
try to run the binary anyway. If there is enough demand, we might be
able to prepare kernels for such users that will run Mathematica.
