Re: [PATCH] a.out: Stop building a.out/osf1 support on alpha and m68k

Kees Cook
2022-03-09T22:02:53Z

On Wed, Mar 09, 2022 at 12:37:54PM -0800, Linus Torvalds wrote:
> On Wed, Mar 9, 2022 at 12:04 PM Eric W. Biederman <ebiederm@xmission.com> wrote:
> >
> > Let's see if anyone cares about a.out support on the last two
> > architectures that build it, by disabling the build of the support in
> > Kconfig.
> [...]
> But sure, it would be interesting to know if any alpha people care - I
> just have this suspicion that we can't drop it that easily because of
> the non-Linux legacy.

It looks like the only distro supporting Alpha is Gentoo. I pulled
down the installation media, and everything is ELF except for firmware
COFF files:

$ find . -type f | xargs file | grep -Ei ':.*(out|coff)'
./lib/firmware/meson/vdec/g12a_hevc_mmu.bin: MIPSEB MIPS-III ECOFF executable not stripped - version 0.0
./lib/firmware/meson/vdec/g12a_vp9.bin: MIPSEB MIPS-III ECOFF executable not stripped - version 0.0
./lib/firmware/meson/vdec/gxl_hevc_mmu.bin: MIPSEB MIPS-III ECOFF executable not stripped - version 0.0
./lib/firmware/meson/vdec/gxl_vp9.bin: MIPSEB MIPS-III ECOFF executable not stripped - version 0.0
./lib/firmware/meson/vdec/sm1_hevc_mmu.bin: MIPSEB MIPS-III ECOFF executable not stripped - version 0.0
./lib/firmware/meson/vdec/sm1_vp9_mmu.bin: MIPSEB MIPS-III ECOFF executable not stripped - version 0.0
./lib/firmware/qca/crbtfw32.tlv: mc68k COFF object not stripped

So, since it's an easy revert, sure. Let's do it.

--
Kees Cook