This is the mail archive of the
binutils@sourceware.cygnus.com
mailing list for the binutils project.
Re: elf32-mips breaks binary compatibility
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