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Re: EI_ABIVERSION usage


On Wed, May 08, 2002 at 12:07:42PM +0100, Richard Earnshaw wrote:
...
> From this it would appear to me that the *intent* of this field is only to 
> aid in the interpretation of OS-specific bits *in other ELF fields* as has 
> been claimed by others.  Note the analogy to e_machine, and the 
> application of the meta-principle: e_machine specifies ELF header 
> extensions specific to the machine, so EI_OSABI specifies ELF header 
> extensions specific to the OS.
> 
> This still leaves open the major question of how we should detect os 
> run-time variants and extensions.  It's clear that none of these OS'es can 
> be truly SVR4 compliant, since most programs will include stdio.h and 
> hence bring in a FILE type pointer which is unlikely to be compliant with 
> the specification.  However, I do have to concede now that it is not clear 
> that EI_OSABI was intended for this -- again extending from Cary's last 

I hope it is clear to everyone (after Richard's correction, of course) and
we can close this issue for goodd now.

> parargraph:
> 
>     For statically-bound programs, I'm afraid we don't have a clear
>     solution. We took the general approach that such programs are 
>     not ABI-conforming in the first place, and can use any 
>     mechanism they might choose to verify that they are executing 
>     on the appropriate implementation.
> 
> We are in a similar situation here, we have a program executable that is 
> tied to its execution environment in some way: the ELF spec, sadly, has 
> nothing explicit to say about how this might be detected.

The runtime implementation is free to do whatever it wants. But it is not
the concern of binutils.


H.J.


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