Re: The elves are coming

Peter T. Breuer (ptb@dit.upm.es)
Wed, 25 Sep 1996 22:25:41 +0200 (MET DST)


jon@gte.esi.us.es wrote:
> It is only the kernel that is ELF only, you can still be 100% a.out in
> userland if you like. Linus is changing how the kernel is loaded and this
> is very much dependant on the binary format, trying to keep the old
> a.out kernel is just asking for bugs to leak in.

I disagree. It is my experience that making sure your code runs in
slightly different environments is a way of eliminating bugs (that
don't show up on one environment or the other). But I would agree
that there is no future in a.out and it should be dropped for that
reason.

I am still very concerned that te 2.0 kernel is showing up many bugs
and that support is shifting to 2.1. I feel no temptation to change from
my present 2.0.0 up to 2.0.21 or thereabouts because it doesn't seem to
buy my users anything other than different bugs. I might as well gather
more data on the kernel I have.

(Actually I feel that 1.3.90 was where I felt happiest in the kernel
development series, all in all... after that a series of major changes
broke lots of things one after the other. I am just upgrading a
portable that got left with a 1.3.90 kernel and it is #%$@ to fix the
things I need so that they work after the upgrade).

Peter T. Breuer
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