Re: elf32-mips breaks binary compatibility

[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...
So IMHO DT_MIPS_LINUX_VERSION would not be very bad solution. And you could
speak with SGI to leave that number for you in the specs.

Cheers,
    Jakub
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Jakub Jelinek | jj@sunsite.mff.cuni.cz | http://sunsite.mff.cuni.cz
Administrator of SunSITE Czech Republic, MFF, Charles University
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UltraLinux  |  http://ultra.linux.cz/  |  http://ultra.penguin.cz/
Linux version 2.3.13 on a sparc64 machine (1343.49 BogoMips)
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