Re: [PATCH] x86: Remove a.out support

Borislav Petkov
2022-01-13T22:57:02Z

On Thu, Jan 13, 2022 at 01:47:34PM -0500, Theodore Ts'o wrote:
> Let's pour one out for being able to run Minix binaries on Linux. :-)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minix_3:

"2013-02-21 ... Dropped support for a.out binaries"

They themselves killed that support a lot earlier. :-)

> Speaking of which, if we're doing this, are there some old system
> calls that we could remove at the same time?

Good question.

Unfortunately, I'm just the janitor removing this and a.out is waaay
before my time. :-)

But I'm open to suggestions on how to determine which are those obsolete
syscalls.

Btw, pls do note that this is removing only the x86 a.out support -
other arches (m68k and alpha) still select HAVE_AOUT and thus the
respective glue in fs/binfmt_aout.c

--
Regards/Gruss,
Boris.