OMAGIC & initial user-process limit

David Mosberger-Tang (davidm@AZStarNet.com)
Tue, 7 Nov 1995 00:04:45 -0700


Well, I turned out that it was easy enough to fix two braindead but
longstanding bugs. So I uploaded a new kernel patch and binaries.

The fixes are that it is now possible to execute OMAGIC files
(binaries linked with with -N) and the initial resource limit on the
number of processes is no longer zero. The latter problem was simply
due to the fact that the Linux/Alpha resource limits are slightly
different from Linux/x86 but TASK_INIT never reflected that
difference.

Oh, I did get my Noname to boot once again, so both the Noname and
Cabrio kernels are now known to work. However, the old "ld" that I
have on the Noname produces bad OMAGIC files (the bss starts at
0x140000000 instead of following right after text & data segments).
So you might need to upgrade your ld too, before OMAGIC *really*
works. But I wonder: why do people like to link things with -N under
Linux/x86 anyway? I see only disadvantages in doing so.

--david