Subject: Re: ARM ELF ABI: consensus?
To: None <thorpej@wasabisystems.com>
From: Richard Earnshaw <rearnsha@arm.com>
List: port-arm
Date: 04/11/2002 10:09:44
> On Mon, Apr 08, 2002 at 02:15:06PM -0700, Jason R Thorpe wrote:
>
> > Ok. An update on this.
>
> ...and the plot thickens.
>
> > I submitted the necessary changes back to the FSF binutils folks, and
> > got *significant* push-back. They seem to strongly disagree with using
> > the EI_OSABI field for this.
> >
> > So, what should we do? Should we back out these changes in our source
> > tree? If so, we should decide quick before the 1.6 branch is actually
> > created.
>
> I just noticed another problem with this. The new elf32-arm-nbsd
> target doesn't grok our ELF core files, because they're dumped with
> EI_OSABI == 0 (the kernel doesn't really know any better).
>
> Right now, I'm inclined to back out the EI_OSABI == ELFOSABI_NETBSD
> change, in light of the pushback from FSF and this gdb lossage.
>
Agreed. It means we loose the ability to tell an arm-linux object (.o
file) from an arm-netbsd one, but that's life; and as was mentioned
before, this is a temporary ABI. Given that EI_OSABI is currently set by
the GNU tools to an unauthorized value (ELFOSABI_ARM), this will certainly
be fixed in the fully conforming ABI, so we can safely detect the
differences.
R.