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

Linus Torvalds
2019-03-11T16:45:56Z

On Mon, Mar 11, 2019 at 9:26 AM Måns Rullgård <mans@mansr.com> wrote:
>
> Anyone running an Alpha machine likely also has some old OSF/1 binaries
> they may wish to use. It would be a shame to remove this feature, IMO.

If that's the case then we'd have to keep a.out alive for alpha, since
that's the OSF/1 binary format (at least the only one we support - I'm
not sure if later versions of OSF/1 ended up getting ELF).

Which I guess we could do, but the question is whether people really
do have OSF/1 binaries. It was really useful early on as a source of
known-good binaries to test with, but I'm not convinced it's still in
use.

It's not like there were OSF/1 binaries that we didn't havce access to
natively (well, there _were_ special ones that didn't have open source
versions, but most of them required more system-side support than
Linux ever implemented, afaik).

Linus