Re: [PATCH] binfmt_flat: Remove shared library support

Arnd Bergmann
2022-04-20T20:05:05Z

On Wed, Apr 20, 2022 at 7:47 PM Kees Cook <keescook@chromium.org> wrote:
>
> Yeah, I was trying to understand why systems were using binfmt_flat and
> not binfmt_elf, given the mention of elf2flat -- is there really such a
> large kernel memory footprint savings to be had from removing
> binfmt_elf?

I think the main reason for using flat binaries is nommu support on
m68k, xtensa and risc-v. The regular binfmt_elf support requires
an MMU, and the elf-fdpic variant is only available for arm and sh
at this point (the other nommu architectures got removed over time).

Arnd