[1083] in SIPB_Linux_Development
Re: ELF migration. (Go lemmings go!)
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Erik Nygren)
Fri Oct 6 01:39:55 1995
To: "Theodore Ts'o" <tytso@MIT.EDU>
Cc: Jered J Floyd <jered@MIT.EDU>, Derek Atkins <warlord@MIT.EDU>,
eichin@MIT.EDU, linux-dev@MIT.EDU
In-Reply-To: Your message of "Thu, 05 Oct 1995 22:25:54 EDT."
<9510060225.AA14479@dcl.MIT.EDU>
Date: Fri, 06 Oct 1995 01:39:25 -0400
From: Erik Nygren <nygren@MIT.EDU>
> I do agree with the previously expressed sentiment that most important
> thing we can do is create easy-to-install packages that allow people
> with a.out systems run ELF binaries. Once we do that, if people want to
> start using ELF, we might as well. *Someone* is going to have to flush
> the bugs out of the 5.x libc. :-)
Will people need to update the a.out shared library and thus gcc
to upgrade to ELF. I remember H Lu's announcement saying that
if you wanted to run 5.x you needed 4.7.x as the a.out libraries
which in turn needed the new gcc. Is this true or not?
I still have 4.5.26 and have been running Matlab out
of the Matlab locker with a bunch of error messages but
it seems to work fine and hasn't made things less stable.
If 5.x and the new ld.so will work with 4.[567].x then
I think the best approach is to provide an install script which:
1) creates /lib/elf (optionally as a symlink into AFS for
people really low on disk space)
2) installs the 5.x and elf X11 shared libs there
3) installs the new ld.so
4) updates ld.so.config to look in /lib/elf
For now it might make sense to keep the linux-athena
packages in a.out (at least till around IAP or so)
but binaries which go in outland or other such places
should start being a mixture of elf and a.out now to give people
a reason to upgrade. (This will actually take up more system
memory if I understand things right, as the images for both
shared libs will have to be partially in memory. This may
be a bad thing).
This is all assuming that people don't need to update their
a.out lib's or their version of gcc. If this is the case
then we'll need to reconsider.
--- Erik
