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Re: elf32-mips breaks binary compatibility


On Tue, Aug 17, 1999 at 02:11:01AM -0400, Ian Lance Taylor wrote:
>    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.

I understood Ralf wants to tag the new binaries with the tag, as tagging the
old ones would mean ldconfig or some other binary walking on all shared
libraries has to tag some of the libraries (or all of them provided the user
is sure he does not have any newly compiled library).

Cheers,
    Jakub
___________________________________________________________________
Jakub Jelinek | jj@sunsite.mff.cuni.cz | http://sunsite.mff.cuni.cz
Administrator of SunSITE Czech Republic, MFF, Charles University
___________________________________________________________________
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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