From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Geoff Keating To: roland@frob.com Cc: ian@cygnus.com, gas2@cygnus.com, libc-hacker@cygnus.com Subject: Re: Has anyone looked at ELF 4.1? Date: Tue, 11 Aug 1998 20:43:00 -0000 Message-id: <199808120338.NAA00513@geoffk.wattle.id.au> References: <199808110743.DAA24061@baalperazim.frob.com> <199808110743.DAA24061@baalperazim.frob.com> X-SW-Source: 1998/msg00204.html > Date: Tue, 11 Aug 1998 03:43:58 -0400 > From: Roland McGrath > I'm now going to proceed on the assumption that EI_OSABI is intended to > indicate the operating system ABI expected by the program. I make this > assumption both because of its name, and because adding two fields whose > sole meaning is "yes, really, the same file format spec" is just plain > idiotic and I'm giving SCO a little (perhaps too much) credit for not being > chalk full of complete idiots. Have you noticed that the file format now defines OS-specific ranges for many of the constants? For instance, SHT_LOOS 0x60000000 SHT_HIOS 0x6fffffff Now, if you're going to have such things, it's good to have a tag in the file format that says what a value of, say, 0x6fffffff means. In the GNU toolchain, it means 'SHT_GNU_versym'; in Sun's or SGI's implementation, it might mean something else. So I imagine that this is one of the things that EI_OSABI selects. -- Geoffrey Keating