Re: a.out coredumping: fix or delete?

[Matthew Wilcox]

On Tue, Mar 05, 2019 at 10:19:04AM +0100, Borislav Petkov wrote:
> On Sat, Mar 02, 2019 at 12:57:30AM +0100, Jann Horn wrote:
> > In theory, Linux can dump cores for a.out binaries. In practice, that
> > code is pretty bitrotten and buggy. Does anyone want that code so much
> > that they'd like to fix it, or can we just delete it?
> 
> I was asking myself the same question while doing
> 
>   10970e1b4be9 ("x86/a.out: Clear the dump structure initially")
> 
> especially since it is kinda hard to get the toolchain to even create an
> a.out executable - your script to create one case-in-point.

It's been 25 years since Linux added support for ELF.  Can we just
delete the a.out support entirely now?  According to the Linux-ELF HOWTO,
support was added in 1.1.52 (August 1994).  It's pretty much necromancy
at this point.