Re: elf32-mips breaks binary compatibility

[Ian Lance Taylor <ian@zembu.com>]

   Date: Tue, 17 Aug 1999 08:06:33 +0200
   From: Jakub Jelinek <jj@sunsite.ms.mff.cuni.cz>

   > Right now I'm working on changing the current linker to tag all binaries
   > such that the dynamic linker can recognice them and do the right thing.
   > Mark has suggested using a DT_MIPS_LINUX_VERSION tag.  I'm a bit
   > reluctant to allocate such a new DT_ tag because MIPS / SGI are using them
   > for all sorts of purposes and I want to avoid a future clash.  So my
   > proposal which is a bit hackish would be to use the DT_MIPS_TIME_STAMP
   > tag with a special magic time stamp.  I've choosen the value 11717580
   > which is equivalent to a date in 1970, therfore should never ever be
   > generated in a binary generated by a SGI linker; current GNU linkers don't
   > emit this tag at all.  Comments?

   With timestamp I see the problem what if quickstart is implemented in
   binutils (I still would like to give it a shot on sparc64 to see if the
   performance boost is worth the trouble), in which case we'll need to use
   DT_MIPS_TIME_STAMP...

Yes, but the argument is that it will never have a date in 1970, and
that only that date will trigger special behaviour by the dynamic
linker.

Ian